[9] He was appointed as Associate Dean for Research and Innovation in the UCLA Division of Social Sciences in 2011 and served in this position until 2016.
[11] In 2013, he co-founded (with his son Charlie Stigler) Zaption, an education technology company in the video learning space.
[12] In the beginning of his career, Stigler's research was focused primarily on cross-cultural comparison of teaching and learning, producing a number of studies and articles,[13] and two trade books: The Learning Gap (co-authored with Harold W. Stevenson) and The Teaching Gap (co-authored with James Hiebert).
He collaborated with a group of Scandinavian researchers on a study comparing algebra teaching in Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the US.
In research with Nicole Kersting at the University of Arizona, Stigler focused on teacher knowledge and how it impacts instructional quality and student learning.
They worked on a theory-based course redesign of introductory statistics as a means of developing and testing what they called the practicing connections hypothesis.
[2] According to this hypothesis, extensive and deliberate practice applying core concepts and representations of a domain to increasingly complex problems throughout a course will result in knowledge that is more coherent, flexible and transferable.
Instead of researchers, curriculum developers, and instructors working in silos, the Better Book approach involves an ongoing collaboration focused on incremental and continuous improvements to an online interactive textbook based on student-generated data.