Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center an NSF Science of Learning Center

Suzanne Reeve, a graduate student researcher from LIFE’s Everyday Science & Technology Group, recently participated with a partner from Seattle’s Pacific Science Center in a workshop at the Miami Museum of Science in Miami, Florida. The Museum has an NIH-funded youth program called Biotrac to encourage youths from underrepresented minority groups and potential first-generation college students to learn about STEM careers.

LIFE researchers are also investigating a possible collaboration with the Museum and its associated Center for Interactive Learning (in cooperation with the University of Miami). The socioeconomic and ethnic diversity of the Miami area, as well as the experience of the museum staff in developing and sustaining programs for underrepresented youth, make this a fertile location for investigating learning in STEM disciplines.

The LIFE Center is a research partner in a new NSF-funded center focused on cultivating excellence in ocean sciences education. The COSEE - Ocean Learning Communities Center will involve stakeholders in the planning and orchestration of formal and informal educational activities with the public about current marine topics. The new center will focus its initial efforts on helping the public learn about the relationship between ocean management and human health. It will experiment with different approaches for cultivating generative learning communities around this topic.

LIFE researchers from the Everyday Science & Technology Group will conduct studies of science learning associated with the new center. Philip Bell, a LIFE Strand Leader in Informal Learning, is a Co-PI of the new COSEE center. Other collaborating institutions include the University of Washington’s College of Ocean and Fishery Sciences, the Seattle Aquarium, and the California Maritime Academy. The new center will be joining the national network of NSF-funded COSEE centers. More information about the COSEE network can be found in the press release announcing the new centers.

The LIFE Diversity Panel, chaired by James Banks (Director, UW Center for Multicultural Education), met for the second time at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, January 12-14, 2006. The primary focus of the LIFE Diversity Panel is to contribute intellectually to Center work to achieve its goal of advancing the sciences of human learning through the integration of diversity, language, and culture concepts in Center research.

Panel members include Kathryn Au, Arnetha Ball, Edmund Gordon, Kris Guitierrez, Shirley Brice Heath, Carol Lee, Jabari Mahiri, Luis Moll, Na’ilah Nasir, Claude Steele, Guadalupe Valdes and Min Zhou. LIFE faculty and students also attended the meeting. The diversity panel is authoring a consensus report that will describe key principles of learning associated with life-long, life-wide, and life-deep learning. They are drawing upon research that has documented how youth learn in diverse communities across formal and informal learning environments. Completion of the report is anticipated for Fall 2006.

Members of the diversity panel, and LIFE, too, are very interested in finding funding to create a CD or DVD that uses some of LIFE’s tools (e.g., STAR.Legacy) to communicate insights about the value of diversity in all aspects of life, and about ways to create learning opportunities (both within and outside of school) that help all people succeed.

Byron Reeves offered a LIFE Center seminar on “Physiological Arousal and Media” (COMM 372) at Stanford University for Winter Quarter 2005. The goal of this course was to provide LIFE and other graduate students with a review of basic literature, discussion of its application to research about media, and training on the new physiological recording equipment to gather physiological data about how people respond to selected features of mediated interactions. The course readings and discussions reviewed physiological methods (particularly skin conductance responses and levels, and heart rate acceleration and deceleration) as they apply to questions about emotional responses during interaction with media. Students completed class projects of their original research ideas using the new equipment to collect and analyze physiological data.

Andrew Meltzoff and Patricia Kuhl are co-teaching a new science of learning course at University of Washington entitled “Introduction to the Science of Learning: From Biology to Behavior.” First developed and introduced in 2006, the course attracts students from diverse departments, including: psychology, speech & hearing sciences, education, computer sciences, linguistics, biology, physics, and music. The course provides an introduction to research on human learning, highlighting new findings in cognitive neuroscience and behavior and examines learning from early infancy to adulthood. The interweaving of biology and culture in human learning and development is emphasized throughout.