With Morton Brown and B. Alan Taylor, she is known for developing "Michigan calculus", a style of teaching calculus and combining cooperative real-world problem solving by the students with an instructional focus on conceptual understanding.
[1][2][3] She is a senior lecturer emerita of mathematics at the University of Michigan, where she taught from 1982 until her retirement in 2006.
After working as a secondary school teacher for two decades, she returned to Michigan in 1982 as coordinator for mathematics and science in the Coalition for the Use of Learning Skills.
[4] With Gleason and others, she became the author of a widely used precalculus textbook, Functions Modeling Change: A Preparation for Calculus (Wiley, 2000; 5th ed., 2017).
[4] In the same year she became the AWM/MAA Falconer Lecturer, speaking on "The Scholarship of Learning and Teaching: A Look Back and a Look Ahead".