"How can we bring research and policy perspectives toward a more coherent view that can enhance our formal educational system’s capacity to prepare all of the nation’s children for successful lives?"

Myriad disciplines, agencies, foundations, and other organizations have long wrestled with this question. The result is a dizzying array of ideas, findings, and programs. Some of the diversity is rooted in fundamental, ideological differences in views of schools’ function – schools as brain training institutes, child development centers, worker production factories, and so forth. Some can be traced to theory, task orientations, disciplinary agendas or "discourses," or institutional missions.

This diversity creates a dilemma. It is, on the one hand, essential to effectively reforming education. On the other hand, it greatly complicates matters: Advances in the areas of cognition, social development, human evolution, culture, and educational practices all have the potential to inform decisions about schooling children. Yet, the scholarly communities in many of these areas remain disconnected from one another, from educational issues, or both. For example, the ground-breaking book, How Students Learn: Reforming Schools Through Learner-Centered Principles (APA, 1998) conceptualizes learners in a rich, multifaceted fashion – a "whole child" approach – but it offers little by way of bridging the divide between research and policy. Conversely, the excellent report, “How People Learn: Bridging Research and Practice” (NAS, 1999), deals specifically with the challenge of implementing psychological research; however, the research review on which the report draws (“How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School,” NAS, 1999) focuses primarily on cognition. At a basic conceptual level, evolutionary psychology has profound implications for education – schools are, after all, one of several environments in which young human primates develop and learn – yet comparative studies of cognition, learning, development, or sociality have received relatively little attention in this context.

Opportunities have been scant for exploring how ultimate (evolutionary, historical) mechanisms are linked to proximate (developmental, contextual, cognitive) mechanisms that shape school performance and for formulating practical, broad-based policy initiatives on this basis. A grant from the National Science Foundation to the Science Directorate of the American Psychological Association, titled “Psychology & Education: Toward New Research/Policy Syntheses” is providing some new opportunities to do so. The long term objective of the project is to build on previous efforts and accelerate the movement toward a more comprehensive understanding of what needs to be done to improve education. Although the project will not involve all relevant academic disciplines to the same extent, they do encompass theoretical approaches and policy entities more diverse than has characterized most previous activities, including: editors and authors of the aforementioned and other relevant books; scholars in cognitive and computer science, social and cognitive development, cross-cultural and comparative psychology and in teaching and learning; and individuals engaged in the formulation of educational policy.

The completed portion of the project includes two symposia, one at a regional meeting (Western Psychological Association) and one at a national meeting (American Psychological Association), organized to stimulate integration of theoretical, empirical, and applied work in psychology and education in novel ways. Each of the two panels was assembled with several criteria in mind: theoretical diversity; inclusion of scholars in psychology and education; inclusion of one or more experts in classroom curricular or pedagogical research; inclusion of one or more experts in basic (cognitive or social) developmental processes; inclusion of one or more people with expertise in the history and/or sociology of educational policy. Precises of the panelists’ papers may be found at:

The Education System, Theodore Wachs

A Human Curriculum, J. Gary Bernhard

Applications of Psychological Knowledge to Schooling, Nadine M. Lambert

Comment on Bernhard and Lambert – Tina A. Grotzer

Remarks on Bernhard, Wachs, Cognition, and Education, Diane F. Halpern

Long term change in the way scholars, practitioners, and policy makers think about education is more likely if the next generation becomes involved early in their careers. Travel support was provided to atotal of fourteen undergraduate and graduate students from diverse research domains, to allow them to attend the symposia and to talk informally with the speakers and each other over lunch. Later, they reflected on their experience in a brief essay.

[Read excerpts from these reflections]

Another part of the project is the provision of small ($1500) seed grants to psychology departments, to encourage psychologists to get better acquainted with their fellow researchers in education or educational psychology departments. Funds may be used to support any activities between April 1 - December 15, 2001, that are designed to promote intellectual cross-fertilization, joint research interests, and new interdepartmental activities. Finally, a lunch meeting in late spring 2001 will bring together staff from psychological and education organizations (APA, APS, AERA) to discuss the role of disciplinary associations in fostering crosstalk between scholars, practitioners, and policy makers in the two areas.

Conclusion

As a result of the persistent attempt to find out why American education is failing to fulfill many children’s potential and many societal needs, many of the elements needed to answer the question have been identified and some of those have been successfully implemented. However, work must continue on identifying remaining pieces of the puzzle and, especially, on how to assemble the pieces into a coherent whole. Succeeding will require the construction of conceptual and structural bridges between scholars working at different distances from educational applications. The activities described herein should contribute meaningfully to achieving that end by bringing together distinguished scholars with expertise in diverse areas of psychology (evolutionary, social, cognitive, cross-cultural) and education research and policy, to stimulate discussion about how to improve education by effectively integrating research and policy.

Links to Grant Money

National Science Foundation

Research on Learning and Education (ROLE) program at NSF

FundSource: A search tool for research funding in the Behavioral and Social Sciences

How People Learn

John D. Bransford, Ann, L. Brown, and Rodney R. Cocking, editors

How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School

Suggested Reading List

Kevin Dunbar

Dunbar, K. & Blanchette, I. (In Press pending revision). The InVivo/InVitro Approach to Cognition: The case of Analogy. Trends in Cognitive Science

Blanchette, I., & Dunbar, K. (In Press). Analogy Use in Naturalistic Settings: The Influence of Audience, Emotion, and Goals. Memory & Cognition

Dunbar, K. (In Press). What scientific thinking reveals about the nature of cognition. In Crowley, K., Schunn, C.D., & Okada, T. (Eds.) Designing for Science: Implications from Everyday, Classroom, and Professional Settings. LEA. Hillsdale:NJ

Dunbar, K. (In Press). Scientific Reasoning and Discovery, Cognitive Psychology of. In The Encyclopedia of the Behavioral Sciences. Elsevier, Oxford, England.

Dunbar, K. (In Press). The analogical paradox: Why analogy is so easy in naturalistic settings, yet so difficult in the psychology laboratory. In D. Gentner, Holyoak, K.J., & Kokinov, B. Analogy: Perspectives from Cognitive Science. MIT press. Cambridge: MA. pp 313-334.

Klahr, D. with K. Dunbar, A. Fay, D. Penner,. & C. Schunn. (2000). Exploring Science: The Cognition and development of Discovery Processes. Cambridge: MA. MIT Press.

Baker, L.M., & Dunbar, K. (2000). Experimental design heuristics for scientific discovery: The use of baseline and known controls. International Journal of Human Computer Studies.

Dunbar, K. (2000). How Scientists Think and Reason: Implications for education. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. 21, 49-58.

Blanchette, I., & Dunbar, K. (2000). How Analogies are Generated: The Roles of Structural and Superficial Similarity. Memory & Cognition, 28, 108-124.

Dunbar, K. (1999). The Scientist InVivo: How scientists think and reason in the laboratory. In Magnani, L., Nersessian, N., & Thagard, P. Model-based reasoning in scientific discovery. Plenum Press, pp 89-98. To appear in Chinese in 2001.

Dunbar, K. (1999). Science. In M. Runco & S. Pritzker (Eds.) The Encyclopedia of Creativity. Academic Press, 1, 1379-1384.

Dunbar, K. (1997). How scientists think: Online creativity and conceptual change in science. In T.B. Ward, S.M. Smith, & S.Vaid (Eds.) Conceptual structures and processes: Emergence, discovery and Change. APA Press. Washington DC. Also reprinted in Japanese (in 1999)

Alan Lesgold

Conference attendees might find the following papers interesting. One is out and another is to appear any time now.

Gott, S. P., & Lesgold, A. M. (2000). Competence in the Workplace: How Cognitive Performance Models and Situated Instruction Can Accelerate Skill Acquisition. In R. Glaser (Ed.), Advances in instructional
psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Lesgold, A., & Nahemow, M. (in press). Tools to assist learning by doing: Achieving and assessing efficient technology for learning. In D. Klahr & S. Carver (Eds.), Cognition and instruction: Twenty-five years of
progress. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Frank Dempster

Selected publications on learning and its applications

Dempster, F. N., & Corkill, A. J. (1999). Interference and inhibition in cognition and behavior : Unifying themes for educational psychology. Educational Psychology Review, 11, 1-88.

Dempster, F. N., & Corkill, A. J. (1999). Individual differences in susceptibility to interference and general cognitive ability. Acta Psychologica, 101, 395-416.

Dempster, F. N. (1997). Using tests to promote classroom learning. In R. G. Dillon (Ed.), Handbook on testing (pp. 557-580). Chicago: Greenwood Press.

Dempster, F. N. (1996). Distributing and managing the conditions of encoding and practice. In E. L. Bjork & R. A. Bjork (Eds.), Handbook of perception and cognition (Vol.10: Memory, pp. 317-344). San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Dempster, F. N., & Brainerd, C. J. (1995). Interference and inhibition in cognition. San Diego, CA: Academic Press.

Dempster, F. N. (1993). Exposing our students to less should help them learn more. Phi Delta Kappan, 74, 432-437.

Dempster, F. N. (1989). Spacing effects and their implications for theory and practice. Educational Psychology Review, 1, 309-330.

Dempster, F. N. (1989). The spacing effect : A case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research. American Psychologist, 43, 627-634.

Dempster, F. N. (1987). Effects of variable encoding and spaced presentations on vocabulary learning. Journal of Educational Psychology, 79, 162-170.

Last updated: 06/11/2008 16:19:11