Monyka L. Rodrigues, PhD

I’m an applied cognitive scientist studying how children learn to read and spell, and how they come to reason about number—and how the way we teach shapes both.

My doctoral work in collaboration with Dr. Sandra Martin-Chang examined how different learning contexts (stories and lists) shape the way adults and children learn to read new words and how these conditions can lead to more durable, accurate lexical representations. That question carried me into early mathematics, where I’m now a Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Mathematics Teaching and Learning Lab at Concordia University, working with Dr. Helena P. Osana on children’s early numeracy development.

As Principal Investigator on a SSHRC Insight Development Grant, I lead a research program investigating how young children come to understand mathematical units (units construction and coordination, unitizing), a deceptively simple concept that quietly underpins everything from skip counting to fractions to algebra.

Critically, I care as much about how research reaches classrooms as I do about the research itself. I collaborate with school boards across Québec and am a proud member of the AIM Collective—a pan-Canadian network of researchers and educators dedicated to early numeracy—who are creating ways to make evidence-based practices and assessment tools usable in schools.

Outside the lab, I tend to 42 plants with varying degrees of success, wrangle three special needs cats, read fantasy and sci-fi voraciously across every age category, and occasionally attend statistics workshops for fun, which tells you most of what you need to know about me.

If you’re a researcher, educator, or practitioner interested in connecting, I’d love to hear from you.