Dr. Granott has served as visiting professor for the Harvard Graduate School of Education and as a grant consultant for Harvard University.
SOUTH POMFRET, VT, July 13, 2017 /24-7PressRelease/ -- Marquis Who's Who, the world's premier publisher of biographical profiles, is proud to name Dr. Nira Granott a Lifetime Achiever. An accomplished listee, Dr. Granott celebrates many years' experience in her professional network, and has been noted for achievements, leadership qualities, and the credentials and successes she has accrued in her field. As in all Marquis Who's Who biographical volumes, individuals profiled are selected on the basis of current reference value. Factors such as position, noteworthy accomplishments, visibility, and prominence in a field are all taken into account during the selection process.
The human mind is perhaps one of the most complex constructs in the universe, and Dr. Granott has devoted her career toward understanding its development during short time spans (Microdevelopment), the mechanisms that create change, and the implications for problem solving for adults and children in their interactions with adults. Her research has challenged pre-existing ideas and helped usher in a new paradigm in psychology and teaching.
Dr. Granott was born in Petah-Tikva, Israel, and started her career as a director of multi-media projects for Education TV in Tel Aviv. After earning a Master of Arts from Tel Aviv University in 1983, she immersed herself in software development as a senior analyst for Control Data Corp. in Israel. In 1987, Dr. Granott came to the U.S. to attend Harvard University, earning a Master of Education in 1988. Her experiences with both software and early childhood learning led her to conduct much of her early research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1993.
A distinctive feature of Dr. Granott's early research is the deployment of Lego robots she called "wuggles", which responded to stimulus such as light, sound, or touch, for researching the understanding of unfamiliar problems. She found that the Microdevelopment of problem solving of successful graduate students who interacted with the wuggles reiterated briefly developmental paths associated with early childhood development. "It looks like these are regressions, but they're happening to support progress," Dr. Granott said in an interview for Education Week in 2002 prior to the publication of "Microdevelopment: Transition Processes in Development and Learning," which she co-edited with Dr. Jim Parziale. "Teachers need to know that this is important because we are all used to thinking of regressions as something bad." Dr. Granott explained that these regressions help access problems through more intuitive processing, and thereby facilitate understanding and further development and learning.
Dr. Granott was referring to the idea that instead of a "staircase model" where children are associated with stepping upward to a completely new method of learning at different stages, developmental change occurs through much variability across stages. People at all ages solve unfamiliar problems, learn, or make discoveries through short-term development that shows fluctuation between different levels and ways of thinking. "There is a view that this is a real paradigm shift in developmental learning," Dr. Granott said in 2002. She has documented her research in "Microdevelopment of Co-Construction of Knowledge During Problem Solving: Puzzled Minds, Weird Creatures, and Wuggles" in 1993, as well as "Puzzled Minds and Weird Creatures: Phases in the Spontaneous Process of Knowledge Construction" in 1990. An important aspect of Dr. Granott's work is studying the way short-term change evolves through interaction -- either among peers or through adult-child interaction. Different types of interactions support change in learning and development, as she wrote in 1993, and developed further in 1998. Instead of the traditional distinction between learning and development, in 1998 Dr. Granott recast the distinction between learning that develops, which has similarity to development, and shallow learning that does not create inherent progress. Dr. Granott discovered several mechanisms that people at all ages use to bootstrap their knowledge to a higher level in successful learning and development, as documented in her writings in the 2002 book.
After acquiring her Ph.D., Dr. Granott served as an assistant professor of psychology and the founding director of the microdevelopment laboratory at the University of Texas, Dallas. She also served as assistant professor of psychology from 1997 to 2002. In 2000, she co-founded OORIM, LLC with her colleague Jeffrey Leynor. Recently, Dr. Granott has co-founded and started co-developing a startup that uses her research findings and newer work.
Dr. Granott has served as visiting professor for the Harvard Graduate School of Education and as a grant consultant for Harvard University. She was a visiting scholar for Tufts University in the early 2000s. In 2005, she served as co-editor for a special issue of New Ideas in Psychology that addressed "scaffolding," a developmental technique that Dr. Granott studied in her early research. She was a member of the American Psychological Society and the Society for Research on Child Development. Dr. Granott has been recognized by the Texas Higher Education Board, the Timberlawn Research Foundation, and as a 1999 Research Grantee by the National Science Foundation. She was included in numerous volumes of Who's Who in America, Who's Who in Medicine and Healthcare, Who's Who in Science and Engineering, Who's Who in the World, and Who's Who of American Women.
In recognition of outstanding contributions to her profession and the Marquis Who's Who community, Dr. Granott has been featured on the Marquis Who's Who Lifetime Achievers website. Please visit www.ltachievers.com for more information about this honor.
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