LearnLab:About

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About the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center

Funded by the National Science Foundation, Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center (PSLC) at Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh is making groundbreaking progress in understanding and developing effective theory and technology for learning. In the PSLC’s first four years, more than 197 worldwide researchers have published more than 565 papers including more than 80 book chapters and journal articles. PSLC has also created this online unified theoretical framework consisting of over 330 pages.

Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center’s LearnLab is a novel, internationally available research facility designed to dramatically increase the ease and speed with which learning researchers create rigorous, theory-based experiments that pave the way to an understanding of robust learning that is both rigorous and realistic. LearnLab’s results survive rigorous experimentation with laboratory-quality methods in real classroom settings. Our mission is to integrate these results into computationally-inspired, experimentally-grounded theories of how and when robust learning occurs. In addition, PSLC’s goal is to educate and inspire both the current and the next generation of learning scientists.

LearnLab consists of six highly instrumented online courses: two in high school mathematics (Algebra and Geometry); two in high school and college sciences (Physics and Chemistry); and two in college level language arts (Chinese, and ESL). These technology-enhanced courses produce volumes of high-density data both on the short-term consequences of variation in learning processes and on the effects of these changes on long-term retention, transfer, and accelerated future learning (i.e., robust learning). This data is available for analysis at learnlab.org.

Find more information about PSLC at http:://www.LearnLab.org