In high school, Scherr worked as an "explainer" at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. She majored in physics at Reed College, where she used the support of a Watson Fellowship for a year abroad studying physics education in Europe, Asia, and Africa. After graduating in 1993 she went to the University of Washington for graduate study in physics and physics education, earning a master's degree in 1996 and completing her Ph.D. in 2001. Her dissertation, An investigation of student understanding of basic concepts in special relativity, was jointly supervised by Lillian C. McDermott and Stamatis Vokos.