Catherine Brieger Stern (1894–1973) was a German psychologist and educator. Born under the name Käthe Brieger, she developed sets of

mathematical manipulatives In mathematics education, a manipulative is an object which is designed so that a learner can perceive some mathematical concept by manipulating it, hence its name. The use of manipulatives provides a way for children to learn concepts throug ...

similar to

Cuisenaire rods Cuisenaire rods are mathematics learning aids for pupils that provide an interactive, hands-on way to explore mathematics and learn mathematical concepts, such as the four basic arithmetical operations, working with fractions and finding divisor ...

for children to use in building up their number sense and knowledge of arithmetic. Her book, ''Children Discover Arithmetic'' (1949) was used by others to work on the problems that children face when learning

arithmetic Arithmetic is an elementary branch of mathematics that deals with numerical operations like addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In a wider sense, it also includes exponentiation, extraction of roots, and taking logarithms. ...

. In 1938, she emigrated to the United States. From 1940 to 1943, she was a research assistant to

Max Wertheimer Max Wertheimer (; April 15, 1880 – October 12, 1943) was a psychologist who was one of the three founders of Gestalt psychology, along with Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler. He is known for his book ''Productive Thinking'' and for conceiving the ...

at the

New School for Social Research The New School for Social Research (NSSR), previously known as The University in Exile and The New School University, is a graduate-level educational division of The New School in New York City, United States. NSSR enrolls more than 1,000 stud ...

Publications

* ''Children Discover Arithmetic'', Catherine Stern,

Harper & Row Harper is an American publishing house, the flagship imprint of global publisher HarperCollins, based in New York City. Founded in New York in 1817 by James Harper and his brother John, the company operated as J. & J. Harper until 1833, when ...

, 1949. * ''Experimenting with Numbers'', Catherine Stern, Margaret Stern and Toni S. Gould. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1950 * ''Structural Arithmetic I, II, III, Teachers Guide and Workbooks'', with M. Stern and T. Gould. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1952 * ''Structural Reading Program, Teachers Guides and Workbooks, A through E'', with M. Stern and T. Gould,

Random House Random House is an imprint and publishing group of Penguin Random House. Founded in 1927 by businessmen Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer as an imprint of Modern Library, it quickly overtook Modern Library as the parent imprint. Over the foll ...

, 1963. * ''Children Discover Reading'', with T. Gould, Random House, 1965. * ''Children Discover Arithmetic'', Catherine Stern and Margaret B. Stern. Harper & Row, 1971.

References

1894 births 1973 deaths German women psychologists Educational psychologists 20th-century German psychologists {{Germany-psychologist-stub