Anna Baccaglini-Frank

Anna Baccaglini-Frank is an associate professor at the Department of Mathematics of the University of Pisa, Italy, where she teaches courses for graduate students pursuing a degree in mathematics and preservice primary and secondary school teachers. After graduating in mathematics from the University of Padova (Italy), she followed her passion for mathematics education and began to work at the Education Development Center (Newton, MA, USA). As a young researcher she pursued doctoral studies in Mathematics Education under the supervision of Maria Alessandra Mariotti (University of Siena, Italy) and Karen Graham (University of New Hampshire, USA), studying high school students’ processes of conjecture generation in dynamic geometry environments. She then briefly, but very enthusiastically, joined Celia Hoyles and Richard Noss’ research team at the London Knowledge Lab (UK), before returning to Italy.
Since 2011 she has become more and more interested in mathematics learning difficulties at all school levels, focusing especially on how physical and digital artifacts can be used to design inclusive mathematics activities. A substantial part of her work in this area has been conducted within the PerContare project, a research-action project aimed at preventing primary school children’s persistent learning difficulties in mathematics. Teacher guides for grades 1-5 have been designed and experimented within this project.
She is the PI of DynaMat, a project funded from 2022 to 2025 by a grant of the Italian Ministry of the University and of Research (MIUR). Through a series of case studies featuring high school students with a history of failure in mathematics, the project aims to identify a variety of mathematics learning profiles (and how these might change), from a discursive perspective, as they engage with newly designed mathematics activities involving digital artifacts.
Anna is the recipient of the first edition (2022) of the “Giovanni Prodi” award for original research in  Mathematics Education, and she is proud to be editor-in-chief of the journal Digital Experiences in Mathematics Education.
She is also co-director, with Pietro Di Martino, of the Center for Advanced Research on Mathematics Education (CARME) founded in 2021 in Pistoia (Italy) thanks to an agreement between UNISER-Pistoia and University of Pisa.