Purpose & Mission
The Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center: Studying Robust Learning with Learning Experiments in Real Classrooms
Read the current version of the PSLC Theoretical Framework.
Statement of Purpose
To produce more rigorously supported, classroom-validated knowledge about effective educational practices, we will create LearnLab, an international resource that combines technology, data stores, basic cognitive research, and classroom testbeds to facilitate a new paradigm of in vivo learning experimentation and yield fundamental and useful scientific principles of robust learning.
Mission Statement
The Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC) will address the widely recognized problem that education research has not yet produced research results that unquestionably work to produce robust student learning and that survive the transition from the lab to the classroom and from one domain, researcher, or developer to other domains, researchers, and developers. Although learning science has no shortage of rigorous laboratory results and associated principles and no shortage of realistic classroom design experiments and associated course innovations, there is a shortage of results that are both experimentally rigorous and realistic. Our goal is to produce results that survive rigorous experimentation with laboratory-quality methods in real classroom settings. We call this paradigm in vivo learning experimentation.
Other forms of rigorous classroom research exists but LearnLab and in vivo experimentation emphasizes the following features:
- Rigorous: Identify causal mechanisms using experimentation. Support high internal validity.
- Realistic: Have results that are relevant to students in existing courses and classrooms. Support high external validity.
Other rigorous classroom methodologies include design research, case studies, and ethnography. These are unquestionably important. They emphasize elements of rigor, like more clear interpretability, that are different from the emphasis on experimental rigor in the studies supported by LearnLab, particularly internally valid support for causal inferences.
Our in vivo experiments will focus on such experimentation on robust learning, that is, learning that is retained over long durations, transfers to novel situations, and accelerates future learning.
We cannot predetermine what results will emerge from this new paradigm, but we will actively pursue a set of research questions and hypotheses about what causes robust learning in the in vivo setting. These initial questions fall into four clusters:
- Coordinative Learning. When, how, and why do students' use of multiple inputs, representations or strategies facilitate learning by providing an avenue for "self-supervised" learning that goes beyond learning supported by teacher and peer feedback?
- Interactive Communications. When, how, and why does classroom talk and tutorial dialog, whether by human or computer, promote robust learning?
- Refinement and Fluency. How do learners determine the causal connections between cues in the environment, their actions, and desired knowledge and how can instructional support and feedback facilitate learners in making such connections? How does more isolated learning of knowledge components interact with learning within larger authentic performances and how can instruction support such interactions to yield more fluent and robust learning?
We will pursue research and knowledge dissemination within and beyond
these clusters by employing five major strategies, euphoniously entitled
inspiration, foundation, collaboration, education, and diversification.
The inspiration strategy is to support exemplary research on robust
learning that will inspire others to turn their attention to finding
out what makes learning robust in in vivo settings. The four research
clusters provide initial guidance, but are not intended to limit researchers.
The ideal hypothesis will be based on a theory of learning, be simple
enough to implement in a rigorously controlled classroom experiment,
and yet produce large gains, increased retention, better transfer
and/or acceleration of future learning. We provide examples of such
hypotheses and associated planned experiments in the strategy section.
The foundation strategy will minimize the demanding set up costs usually required of individual researchers who want to perform in vivo experimentation. We will do so by provided a well-organized technical and social infrastructure to aid learning researchers. In particular, the PSLC will develop LearnLab, an international resource for learning scientists that combines classroom testbeds, advanced technology, and a vast and detailed database of learner interactions. LearnLab will facilitate in vivo experimentation by researchers from around the world by providing social and technological facilities for creating, running, and analyzing such experiments more easily than ever before.
The collaboration strategy goes beyond the collaboration one normally finds in a center by using a committee structure to coordinate the studies and activities among the different LearnLab courses. We plan to provide and instrument seven courses: Algebra, Geometry, Physics, Chemistry, French, Chinese and English as a second language. These courses will host the in vivo experimentation. For each course, there is a course committee composed of the instructors, the experimenters and other researchers involved in the course. The course committees will not only orchestrate the course, they will help incoming experimenters plan their experiments and their data analyses. The course committee members will have strong incentives to collaborate intensely, as they share not only the same task domain but the same students, educational software and data streams. The goal of these course committees is to engender unprecedented levels of collaboration between practitioners and researchers from a variety of disciplines, to the benefit of all. In addition, center members from different courses will often be using the same LearnLab tools, which should increase cross-course collaboration. In short, the LearnLab is not only a means for increasing researcher efficiency, but it is a means of increasing collaboration and research inspiration as well.
Our fourth and fifth strategies are to enhance diversity and education in the learning sciences and in the beneficiaries of learning science. LearnLab both requires and affords new training of learning scientists to take advantage of this new paradigm. LearnLab will enrich the scientific infrastructure by establishing extensive collaborations among a new cadre of current and future cognitive and developmental psychologists, statisticians, psychometricians, computer scientists and instructional designers. We will provide both pre-doctoral and post-doctoral students extensive research experience in developing and using LearnLab to generate robust learning principles. Experimental manipulations that demonstrate substantial learning gains will be incorporated in LearnLab schools that reach diverse populations and eventually to many other schools. Diversity efforts will focus on activities to increase the pipeline of racially diverse students and researchers in the learning sciences from the high school level to center leaders. Our education and diversity strategies are necessary to enable the new learning science research paradigm that LearnLab will make possible.