Her research includes studies of responsive teaching and active learning, video and gestural analysis of classroom behavior, and student understanding of energy and special relativity.
In high school, Scherr worked as an "explainer" at the Exploratorium in San Francisco.
[1] She majored in physics at Reed College,[2] where she used the support of a Watson Fellowship for a year abroad studying physics education in Europe, Asia, and Africa.
Her dissertation, An investigation of student understanding of basic concepts in special relativity, was jointly supervised by Lillian C. McDermott and Stamatis Vokos.
[2] Scherr was elected as a Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2017, after a nomination from the APS Topical Group on Physics Education Research, "for foundational research into energy learning and representations, application of video analysis methods to study physics classrooms, and physics education research community leadership".