Learning Sciences

Learning Sciences is an interdisciplinary community devoted to the study of teaching and learning as they occur in school, online, in the workplace, at home, and in the community, and to the design of environments with the potential to facilitate learning and development more effectively. One strand of emphasis within this community is the examination of emerging technologies as potential levers for change and supports for learning. More broadly, members of this group use analytic units ranging from individual learners to complex systems in advancing the combined goals of explaining, guiding and developing educational phenomena. This research is guided by multiple theoretical perspectives, including cognitive, constructivist, situative and sociocultural theories of learning. While drawing upon a range of established methodologies, this community also seeks to examine new approaches, such as design-based research, in an effort to meet the dual challenge of solving problems of practice and building new theory.

The International Society of the Learning Sciences, incorporated as a non-profit professional society in September, 2002, unites the traditions started by the Journal of the Learning Sciences, the International Conferences of the Learning Sciences (ICLS), and the Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning Conferences (CSCL) and offers publications, conferences, and educational programs to the community of researchers and practitioners who use cognitive, socio-cognitive, and socio-cultural approaches to studying learning in real-world situations and designing environments, software, materials, and other innovations that promote deep and lasting learning.

Researchers in the interdisciplinary field of learning sciences, born during the 1990’s, study learning as it happens in real-world situations and how to better facilitate learning in designed environments – in school, online, in the workplace, at home, and in informal environments. Learning sciences research is guided by constructivist, social-constructivist, socio-cognitive, and socio-cultural theories of learning.

Learning scientists harvest theories of active, constructivist, and participatory learning to design software and learning environments and ways of educating that promote deep and lasting learning. As a parallel activity, they study people’s interactions and behaviors and learning in these engineered environments to learn more about both learning itself, how to promote better learning, and how to promote learning more effectively.

Learning sciences is the interdisciplinary pursuit of

• Understanding what “learning for applicability” looks like – developmental trajectories, manifestations of different gradations of understanding and capability with the end product being learners who can productively use concepts, skills, and practices they are learning

• Identifying ways of promoting deep and lasting learning – of complex skills, practices, and content; in the classroom, on the job, informally, and as part of life-long learning endeavors; in person and at a distance

• Identifying the environmental factors (large and small) that effect how people learn – who and what need to play roles, the roles they need to play, details about enactment of those roles, and so on

• Designing software, activity structures, curriculum materials, environments, teacher professional development, etc., to promote such learning

• Designing methodologies for studying learning in vivo.

Learning scientists have a set of deep and abiding beliefs.

• Learners are social animals who participate in communities and who learn by participation and active construction of mental models (learning sciences is rooted in cognitive, socio-cognitive, and socio-cultural approaches to learning).

• Technology can help promote learning in powerful ways. To do that, it needs to be designed carefully taking the needs of learners and their whole social system and environment into account, and ways the software might be integrated into the learning environment must be considered and designed along with the software. Learner-centered design (e.g., Soloway et al., 1993) and classroom-centered design (e.g., Tabak & Reiser, 1997) provide guidelines about what to take into account in designing learning environments.

• We need to work with those who know learning environments and learners well (e.g., teachers) as part of our research.

• If we want to understand how learning happens in complex situations, then we should study learning as it is occurring in those environments – with all the messiness of the real world and requiring methodologies that can nonetheless extract trends and descriptions.

• Design is an important kind of research in and of itself, not simply done in service to investigation.

Learning sciences is a design science, an integration science, a socio-cognitive science, a descriptive science, and an experimental science, all carried out in Pasteur’s Quadrant (Stokes, 1997).