Although he worked within a neo-Piagetian (information processing oriented) paradigm during his doctoral research, using statistical methods, his subsequent work was initially based in school science classrooms and later extended to mathematics and science in fish hatcheries, environmental activism, field ecology, scientific laboratories, dental practice, water technicians, construction sites, and in local communities.
Graphing as Social Practice Psychologist tend to theorize graphing, as all other forms of representing activity, as a faculty of the mind. Based on his ethnographic studies of mathematics among scientists, Roth proposes to view graphing as a social practice that humans learn
in relation with others; the relation
is what we subsequently attribute to the mind. Because graphing is a
social fact, it can be studied using anthropological methods, which is precisely what Roth proposes in
Towards an Anthropology of Graphing and in a comprehensive review of the literature.
Gesture Studies Gestures constitute an integral aspect of knowing and learning. Arising from his studies of learning in high school science laboratories and hands-on elementary school activities, Roth showed how students' scientific knowledge arises from what initially are simply manipulative movements and hand movements to explore and learn about the natural world. These movements later become symbolic movements, that is, gestures, which encode the earliest forms of knowing that can be observed prior to verbal forms. In the main review journal of educational research he published a summary of the work in psychology, anthropology, and linguistics.
Coteaching Whereas in many professions, practitioner learn while working with others, teachers have to figure out much of their knowledge on their own. Using it initially as a form of staff development, Roth, subsequently working with Ken Tobin, developed coteaching as a form learning to teach while teaching. Together they published
At the Elbow of Another, in which they lay out the foundation of this approach. In this model, supervision and evaluation of teaching and research on teaching have to be conducted by teaching together with the resident teachers.
Cultural-Historical Activity Theory Roth has contributed to this field especially by theorizing school-related processes in terms of a version of this theory that was popularized in the Center for Activity Theory and Developmental Work Research. He proposed a fourth generation of this theory, which takes into account emotion. Together with Yew Jin Lee, he wrote a review of the literature on this "neglected legacy" of the work of
Lev S. Vygotsky.
Knowing in the Flesh Most recently, Roth has been working on questions of
embodied cognition, which is in fact a misnomer, for all cognition inherently is embodied. Following the French philosophers
Maine de Biran and
Michel Henry he conceives of the emergence of signification from the auto-affection of the flesh. All perception, all knowing, all communication therefore arises from forms of movement. In a number of publications, he develops this way of understanding knowing with data from geometry in second-grade classrooms.
Toward an Evental Perspective Since 2013, Roth has focused on developing theories that account for experience and activities from an evental perspective, which contrasts the object ontology characteristic of research in the social sciences. The distinction parallels that which
Harold Garfinkel made between formal methods, studying social facts (e.g., a waiting line), and
ethnomethodology, which focuses on studying the doing (visible), the results of which receive the names of these facts in a practice called
formulating. One important area of research was to implement the change that
L.S. Vygotsky announced during the last months of his life, where, in his notebooks, he renounced all of his prior work. Roth and colleagues named this their "late Vygotskian, Spinozist approach". A final development in Roth’s work can be observed in his turn to a pragmatist foundation – following J. Dewey, Mead, W. James and A.N. Whitehead – that takes an transactional vs. interactional approach to the analysis and understanding of social life. ==Academic Honors and Service==