[2] She has a master's degrees in mathematics and a Ph.D. in mathematics education from Northwestern;[3] the topic of her 1984 doctoral dissertation was Individual Differences in Rule Discovery: An Exploratory Study of the Inductive Reasoning Game Eleusis.
[2] She has taught mathematics at the middle school level in Evanston, Illinois, where Northwestern is located.
[4] After completing her Ph.D., she was a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University,[3] working there with Jill H. Larkin,[5] and briefly held a position as assistant professor of mathematics education at Northern Illinois University.
[4][6] Her state teaching certifications were brought into question in 2005, as part of a political battle with the school board over the continuation of these two programs, and she was placed on leave from her position in 2006.
[10] Briars is a coauthor of What Principals Need to Know about Teaching and Learning Mathematics (Solution Tree Press, 2012) and of a teacher guide to the mathematics components of the Common Core State Standards Initiative, Common Core Mathematics in a PLC at Work, Grades 6-8 (Solution Tree Press, 2013).