John Rudolph

professor, U Wisconsin, Madison

John Rudolph received his Ph.D. in 1999 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in curriculum and instruction. He also holds a masters degree in the history of science. Prior to his appointment in the department, he spent a number of years teaching physics, chemistry, and biology at both the high school and middle school levels. He has been in the department for the last ten years and is also a faculty affiliate of the Science and Technology Studies Program on campus. His main area of research concerns the history of science education in American high schools. In addition to this, he has written on issues related to the nature of science in the present-day school curriculum and on how the history and philosophy of science has been used as a theoretical framework in science education research. He is currently at work on a book-length historical study that examines the varied way scientific epistemology has been portrayed in classrooms over the past 125 years. This work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Spencer Foundation. During the 2004-05 academic year, he pursued a portion of this larger work related to the material components of the school classroom as a National Academy of Education/Spencer Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow.