Background

Liping Ma was born on the 16th of April, 1951 in Shanghai, China, the daughter of Sifang Ma and Lifang Liu.

Education

Liping Ma graduated from high school in Shanghai. After the Cultural Revolution, she passed the admission exam and became a student of East China Normal University under the renowned educator and the University president Ms. Liu Fonian. In 1983, she received a Master of Arts degree in Education. Later, she immigrated to the United States. There she attended Michigan State University, where she did a doctoral program in 1989-91. She transferred to Stanford University in 1991 to study Instructional Design under Lee Shulman, former National Education Committee Chairman. In 1996, she obtained a Doctor of Philosophy degree from it.

Career

Liping Ma joined Chunqian Elementary School in Yongfeng County, Jiangxi, China as a teacher in 1970 that post she held for seven years. Between 1974 and 1976, she served as its principal. In 1978-80, she was an elementary school superintendent at Yongfeng County Bureau of Education in Jiangxi, China. Three years later, she began to work for Shanghai Research Institute for Higher Education in Shanghai, China as an assistant research professor until 1988. A year later, she moved to the National Center for Research on Teacher Education at Michigan State University as a research assistant. In 1991, she was promoted to a research consultant, which post she held for five years.

In 1991-92, Liping was involved in Pedagogy and Substance Project at Stanford University as its research assistant. She also held the same post at the Center for Research on the Context of Teaching at Stanford University during 1993 and 1995. She formed Stanford Chinese School in 1994, Palo Alto, where she applied Chinese traditional pedagogy and modern educational theory and created the overseas Chinese language textbook series to promote the "Direct Recognition" approach. Liping Ma guided her team to develop her school’s AP Chinese curriculum and she has personally taught the AP Chinese classes at Stanford Chinese School for several years.

Two years later, Liping Ma was McDonnell's postdoctoral fellow at the School of Education at the University of California (now Graduate School of Education) in Berkeley for two years and became an adjunct profession at Shanghai Normal University. In 1997, she took the post of an adjunct profession at the Asian Language department at Stanford University. For the next two years, she served as a consultant for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 2000, she was a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institute of Stanford University (now The Hoover Institution). She also presented papers at professional conferences in the United States. Presently, she works as an independent researcher.

During Liping Ma's academic career in China and the United States, she has published many papers. She has produced numerous scholarly articles and papers, edited Research on Teachers, in Chinese, and written a crosscultural study, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States that was written in 1999, as well as an educational volume titled Knowing Mathematics: Intervention Program, coauthored with Cathy Kessel in 2001. Her most recent book, Antibiotic Resistance Genes Carried by Microbial Communities in Drinking Water Systems came out in 2017.

Achievements

• Liping Ma is an outstanding mathematician, as well as a prolific author of books. She was named an Outstanding teacher of Yongfeng County in China in 1973 and 1974. In 1976, she was named an Outstanding principal of Yongfeng County. In 1988, she received the Outstanding Research Paper Award by the National Association of Higher Engineering Education in China. In 1989, she received the Arthur R. and Pearl Butler Award.
  
  As an expert in mathematics education, Ma was nominated as a member of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel of the United States in 2006-08.
  
  Liping Ma's doctoral thesis Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics Teachers Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States became a best seller in mathematics education in the United States and was translated into different languages. The Chinese teaching materials written by her has already been adopted by more than 100 Chinese schools all over the world. During Liping's time at Stanford Chinese School more than 80 students took the AP Chinese test each year, and all the students have received full scores.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics: Teachers' Understanding of Fundamental Mathematics in China and the United States

    (Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics describes the...)

    1999
  • Knowing Mathematics: Interven­tion Program 2001
  • Antibiotic Resistance Genes Carried by Microbial Communities in Drinking Water Systems 2017

Views

Liping Ma thinks that a profound understanding of fundamental mathematics includes four key features. The first is Connectedness. A teacher's knowledge of mathematics should be fully connected. The teacher must be able to see how math concepts relate to one another so that they can build new knowledge upon what students already know.

The second feature is Multiple Perspectives, which means having the ability to approach mathematics in a variety of ways. Teachers who develop multiple perspectives for each basic math topic have complete knowledge of that topic.

Thirdly, teachers must understand that elementary math consists of Basic Ideas. These basic ideas that recur throughout math learning create a solid foundation on which to build future math learning.

The last feature is the Longitudinal Coherence. What is taught today becomes the base for future knowledge, just as current mathematics teaching builds upon students' previous knowledge, however fragmentary that knowledge may be. With this profound understanding of fundamental mathematics, teachers will be able to teach students more successfully.

Quotations: "The success lies in the fact that the teaching materials have been revised and improved continuously in the teaching process."

"To fully promote mathematics learning, teachers must first have a profound understanding of fundamental mathematics. They must know well the mathematics they teach each day and feel both confident and comfortable talking it."

Connections

Liping Ma is married to Jiangeng Xia. They have two children, Sushu Xia and John Xia.

Father:

Sifang Ma

Mother:

Lifang Liu

child:

Sushu Xia

child:

John Xia

husband:

Jiangeng Xia