Rossana is a researcher working in the Mathematical Reasoning in Year 2 effectiveness trial, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), which aims to enhance mathematical achievement. The project is delivered by classroom teachers who receive online training and are supported by teacher leaders. Teachers and their students are provided with materials for 12 units of mathematical reasoning sessions, including computer games. Rossana’s role within the project focuses on investigating the effectiveness of the training provided to teacher leaders, while also overseeing the computer games used in the trial.
Rossana has a background in clinical psychology, before finishing her doctorate in Education she worked extensively as a researcher and as a child psychologist in Costa Rica, Peru, and the UK. Her work has focused on improving children’s achievement, particularly on literacy, numeracy, and working memory, and supporting their mental health. She worked developing interventions and analysing secondary data. She also led an RCT in rural Peru, funded to improve early numeracy learning for over 1,600 children and their teachers. And after completing her doctoral studies she became a Senior Lecturer at the Universidad Privada de Ciencias Aplicadas in Peru, teaching research methods and supervising students’ dissertations.
Rossana’s research interests focus on children’s cognitive development, particularly what influences their learning, how to raise and assess achievement in domain-specific subjects such as math and literacy, as well as in general cognitive abilities. Her doctoral research, in collaboration with Prof Terezinha Nunes and Prof Lars Erik Malmberg, focused on different mathematical abilities supporting fractions learning.