Saxe's research focuses on the interplay between cultural and cognitive developmental processes in the reproduction and alteration of ideas in human communities.

Saxe's faculty appointments began in 1977, first at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in the PhD Program in Educational Psychology.

In a 1987 monograph,[3] he and colleagues conducted a range of studies on the home environments and adult-child interactions in middle- and working- class communities.

Hence children's early numerical environments constructed are dynamic and interactive, a process that supports children's acquisition of cultural forms for number representation, like counting systems, and increasingly use these forms to serve increasingly complex functions (e.g., counting to compare groups, elementary arithmetical transformations.)

In a related program of work, Saxe investigated the mathematical understandings of unschooled and schooled children who sell candy in the streets in NE Brazil during periods of a rapidly inflating economy.

Saxe's long-term field research project was conducted over more than a 30-year stretch of time with a remote Papua New Guinea group, the Oksapmin, who traditionally use a 27-body part counting system.

[5] Through field visits (1978, 1980, 2001, 2014), he made use of archival, ethnographic, interview methods coupled with quasi-experimental designs in order to trace the interplay between historical change in the everyday numerical problems that emerged in collective practices and shifts in forms of the body system and functions that it served in daily life.

In a second arena of research, Saxe's focus, together with colleagues, was to support children's understandings of integers and fractions, important but difficult-to-learn and hard-to-teach ideas.

[2] informed by prior work on collective practices and children's mathematical thinking, Saxe and colleagues developed a curriculum unit that uses the number line as a central representational context.

Professor Joseph Glick, a developmental psychologist from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York writes in the journal Human Development about the book's theoretical contribution, "This book is a tour de force in moving theory toward a fully historical, social and activity-based account of cultural and developmental change.

"[13]  Professor Ellice Forman, from the University of Pittsburgh writes in Mathematical Thinking and Learning, "Cultural anthropologist Clifford Geertz proposed that "small facts speak to large issues" (1973, p. 23).

"[15] Finally, Professor Ashley Maynard, a psychologist from the University of Hawaii praises Saxe's theoretical and research contributions in the Journal of Cognition and Development, "Saxe is a master of theory and method in human development, and he provides a model for how to conduct contextually grounded, theoretically useful, path-breaking research that moves the field forward.

For example, Richard Lehrer from Vanderbilt University wrote about Saxe's article analyzing classroom studies of the LMR curriculum,[6] "this research stands as a landmark of productive simplifications of complex forms of interaction in a way that is tractable for both design and analysis.