UREM-ULB :
Unité de Recherche sur l’Enseignement des Mathématiques

Le professeur Alan Schoenfeld a reçu la Médaille Felix Klein 2011.

C’est la récompense la plus prestigieuse en éducation mathématique.

Citation

« 
The Felix Klein Medal for 2011 is given to the Elizabeth and Edward Connor Professor of Education and
Affiliated Professor of Mathematics, Alan H. Schoenfeld, University of California at Berkeley, USA, in
recognition of his more than thirty years of sustained, outstanding lifetime achievements in mathematics
education research and development. Alan Schoenfeld developed a keen interest in mathematics education
early in his career, and emerged as a leader in research on mathematical problem solving. He shows a life-
long pursuit of deeper understanding of the nature and development of mathematical learning and teaching.

His work has helped to shape research and theory development in these areas, making a seminal impact on
subsequent research. Alan Schoenfeld has also done fundamental theoretical and applied work that connects
research and practice in assessment, mathematical curriculum, diversity in mathematics education, research
methodology, and teacher education. He has more than 200 highly-cited publications in mathematics
education, mathematics, educational research, and educational psychology. His scholarship is of the highest
quality, reflected in esteemed recognition over the years.

Alan Schoenfeld has nurtured a generation of new scholars who generate increasing impact on mathematics
education research. He has undertaken a remarkable amount of outstanding work for national, regional, and
international communities in education, mathematics, and mathematics education, providing leadership in
professional associations and joint research endeavors, and has been an invited keynote speaker at
numerous conferences around the globe.

Alan Schoenfeld began his career as a research mathematician. After obtaining a B.A. in mathematics from
Queen’s College, New York, in 1968, and an M.S in mathematics from Stanford University in 1969, he earned
a PhD in mathematics at Stanford in 1973. He became a lecturer at the University of California at Davis in
1973, and in 1975 a lecturer and research mathematician in the Graduate Group in Science and Mathematics
Education (SESAME) at the University of California at Berkeley. After academic appointments at Hamilton
College (1978-1981) and the University of Rochester (1981-1984), Alan Schoenfeld was invited back to U.C.
Berkeley in 1985 to develop the mathematics education group. He has been a full professor since 1987, and
now has a named chair in education and is an affiliated professor in the mathematics department. He has
also been a Special Professor of the University of Nottingham since 1994.
He has been an elected member of the U.S. National Academy of Education since 1994, a member of its
Executive Board in 1995, and Vice President in 2001. He also served as the President of American Educational
Research Association (AERA) in1998/9. In 2000 he led the writing team for Principles and Standards for
School Mathematics for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics where.
Amongst Alan Schoenfeld’s many publications we mention his highly-cited, groundbreaking book,
Mathematical Problem Solving (1985), his chapter on cognition and metacognition, Learning to think
mathematically : Problem solving, metacognition, and sense-making in mathematics (in the 1992 Handbook
for Research on Mathematics Teaching and Learning), his rigorous study of the development and learning of
a complex mathematical idea, Learning (1993, co-authored with J.P. Smith and A.A. Arcavi), his finely-
detailed work on teacher decision making, Toward a theory of teaching-in-context (published in Issues in
Education in 1998), and his most recent book, How We Think (2010).

Alan Schoenfeld’s seminal theoretical contributions are all based on, and buttressed by, long sequences of
carefully designed experiments and their exhaustive analysis. »