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

As part of a partnership with the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) LIFE Center members participated in presenting two workshops at the 2007 NSBE National Convention in Columbus, Ohio. One workshop was presented by T. Kieran O’Mahony and Drue Gawel (both University of Washington Cognitive Science Ph.D. students in the College of Education) on March 29, 2007. At NSBE’s request, the workshop entitled “Learn How YOU Learn” was re-designed for middle and high school students attending the convention.
After being introduced by LIFE Center Research Associate Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana, Mr. O’Mahony and Mr. Gawel presented to about 100 pre-college students:

• What affects their learning
• How they can become lifelong learners
• How they become efficient and innovative experts in school domains
• How they can see assessments as opportunities for improving their understandings before it is too late

A wiki or blog site will be created by LIFE for the workshop participants to benefit from further discussions. This successful workshop was part of NSBE’s Academic Excellence track.

As part of a partnership with the National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE) LIFE Center members participated in presenting two workshops at the 2007 NSBE National Convention in Columbus, Ohio. One of those workshops was a joint presentation with invited researchers from MIT and Auburn University.
The work was entitled “Low-Cost Advanced Educational Technologies: Closing the Digital Divide”. The presenters were

• Dr. David Cavallo, Future of Learning Group Co-head, MIT Media Lab
• Dr. Baba Kofi Weusijana, LIFE Research Associate, University of Washington
• Shaundra Bryant Daily, Affective Computing, MIT Media Lab
• Wanda Eugene, Human Centered Computing Lab, Auburn University

Advanced educational technologies affordable for resource-poor communities in and outside of the USA were presented, including the $100 laptop (http://www.laptop.org) and the computerized pen (see http://www.anoto.com/ and http://www.flypentop.com). An open discussion about how NSBE members can get involved in related research and activism projects. A wiki or blog site will be created by LIFE for the workshop participants to benefit from further discussions.

Investigators: Roy Pea, Shelley Goldman, A. Booker, K. Blair, I. Esmonde, O. Jimenez, L. Martin
Institution: Stanford University

Figure 1. Four families discussing their everyday uses of math

Project and Outcomes Description:

Professors Pea and Goldman and their NSF-funded team at Stanford University have discovered new insights about the nature of mathematical activities and learning opportunities at home in family life. This is important because of the oft-observed difficulties for many students of becoming engaged in mathematics or bridging their everyday knowledge productively into school. We have studied 20 diverse families that include middle schoolers (74 participants, including 38 children), and identified the diverse contexts that serve as locations for their cultural practices of mathematics use and learning. Mathematical activities are widespread in daily life–arts & crafts, events planning, budgeting & finance, cooking, games, hobbies, home improvement, keeping in touch, music, school homework, shopping, sports, time management, travel, and adult work at home. We established inter-rater reliability for definitions of 20 different types of mathematics employed in these activities (e.g., algebra; data analysis; decimals; fractions; proportional reasoning).

From analyses of over 300 different mathematical problems described, we find that family mathematics varies considerably from the structure of school mathematics: (1) Problems emerge out of motivated needs and are resolved adaptively with division of labor and uses of tools and distributed resources; (2) Complex interacting values, such as minimizing effort–but also cost and error–guide problem solving processes and outcomes; (3) Satisficing rather than optimal solutions are commonplace; (4) Multiple kinds of mathematics are used at once, interwoven for the needs at hand (e.g., measurement, arithmetic, geometry, proportional reasoning), rather than single topics within a subject as in school.

These results have important implications for mathematics education. It will be important to systematically explore home-school connections to find new design opportunities for bridging home-based funds of knowledge and formal learning environments. We need to develop and research pedagogical models that can productively leverage learners’ experiences with these features of mathematics out of school.

Investigators: Yawei Cheng, Andrew Meltzoff, Jean Decety
Institutions: University of Washington and University of Chicago

Figure Legend. Significant correlation (r = .38, p < 0.01, N = 40) between the percentage of signal change in the right inferior frontal gyrus during the observation of grasping food and the self-report ratings of hunger (as measured by the VAS scale); = hungry group; = satiated- group.
From: Yawei, C., Meltzoff, A. N., Decety, J. (2007). Motivation modulates the activity of the human mirror-neuron system. Cerebral Cortex, doi:10.1093/cercor/bhl107, in press.
(Meltzoff grants permission for NSF to use the image for non-commercial purposes.)

Motivation Modulates the Activity of the Human Mirror-Neuron System
In a novel brain-imaging study, Yawei Cheng (postdoc, Taiwan), Andrew Meltzoff (U. Washington), and Jean Decety (U. Chicago) discovered that motivation modulates the activity of the mirror-neuron system in humans. This basic finding has implications for education and theories of learning. Scientists have long wondered whether the mirror-neuron system is automatic: Does the brain automatically resonate to the activities of social others, or is this modulated by the observer’s own motivational state and the match between the observer’s desires and those of the person he/she is watching?

In this NSF-supported study published in Cerebral Cortex, two groups of healthy participants underwent two fMRI scanning sessions separated by 1.5 hr interval. During each session, participants were presented with video-clips of another person grasping inanimate objects or grasping food. The first fMRI session was conducted with participants who had fasted (Group 1) and were hungry. Then these participants were allowed to eat and were scanned again. Participants from Group 2 had a meal before the first session and so were satiated. Regions belonging to the mirror neuron system- including the inferior frontal gyrus, the posterior parietal cortex, and the extrastriate-body-area - showed greater response when participants were hungry and watching other people grasping food. There was also a correlation between brain and behavior-a positive correlation between the self-report ratings of hunger and the neural activity in the inferior frontal gyrus and amygdala.

These results show that motivation modulates neural activity in the mirror-neuron system, probably serving the function of preparing the subject for intentional action. The results have implications for theories of learning. They suggest that the observer (student) resonates with the person observed (teacher) in a different way when the two share the same goals/desires, and that the observer’s own motivations changes how the brain responds to and interprets the goal-directed acts of others.

Figure 1: Participant in VR learning environment: 1) Head-Mounted Display(HMD), 2) monitor showing what participant is seeing in the HMD, 3) Game-pad used to notify agent/avatar, 4) rendering computer, 5) equipment recording skin conductance level (SCL).

Investigators:
Faculty: Daniel Schwartz, Jeremy Bailenson; Students: Sandra Okita

Institution: Stanford University

Stanford researchers, Sandra Okita, Jeremy Bailenson, and Daniel L. Schwartz, demonstrated that people learn more deeply if they believe they are interacting with another person. Thirty-five adult participants interacted with an embodied computer agent in virtual reality for 10 minutes (Fig 1). In the Avatar condition, participants heard that they were interacting with a person whom they had met earlier in a waiting room. In the Agent condition, participants heard they were interacting with a computer agent. Interactions in both conditions were identical - participants read questions about the mechanisms that maintain a fever and the computer program provided partial answers. Afterwards participants answered the original questions about fever mechanisms plus novel questions. Participants in the Avatar condition performed 20% better on both old and new questions, and they went beyond the information provided by the computer. Skin conductance levels were also measured within the virtual reality phase. Avatar participants showed higher levels of arousal. Arousal during the reading of a question was positively correlated with the quality of the answer to that question at posttest. The results indicate that socializing computer learning environments enhances learning, even when all interactions remain the same.

Investigators: Brigid Barron, Caitlin Martin, Susie Wise, Rachel Fithian, Lori Takeuchi, Sarah Walter, Sarah Lewis, Karin Forsell
Institution: Stanford University

Figure 1.
Visualization of one child’s learning activity and social network across developmental time and setting

Project and Outcomes Description: Professor Barron and her research team at Stanford University have identified 8 unique roles that parents or other adults play in supporting teens learning to create and express themselves using computing technologies. These roles range from project collaborator, to explanation provider, to broker of new activities, to financier. The roles were identified through intensive case studies (see Figure 1 for an example of a representation of a single child’s learning ecology across time and setting) and their ubiquity is being validated through survey methods. The number of adults who play such roles, and the diversity of roles that are played across different adults in a child’s social network are correlated with the breadth of experience students have had with fluency building activities such as movie making, web design, programming, or robotics. The number of friends one has that are interested in technology is also correlated with experience. These findings are important for understanding sources of individual differences in the development of technological fluency, for advancing our understanding of the nature of informal teaching and learning processes, and have implications for the design of learning environments. This work is funded by the National Science Foundation as part of the LIFE Science of Learning Center.

Investigators: Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola, Patricia K. Kuhl, Barbara Conboy, Harriett Romo, UTSA graduate students
Institutions: University of Washington and University of Texas at San Antonio

Figure 1. (at right) Infant being prepared for brainwaves (Event-related Potentials) recording in San Antonio.

Project and Outcomes Description:

“Bilingual Language Learning and Social-Cultural Contexts”

LIFE obtained supplemental funding for the collaborative research study between LIFE Center researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences and researchers at the University of Texas, San Antonio, led by Harriett Romo, The study evaluates brain correlates of speech perception in bilingual infants, and how environment affects both early speech perception and later language. This study examined infants being raised in bilingual homes (exposed to English and Spanish) at 6-12 months using brain and behavioral measures of speech perception that have previously been shown to predict future language abilities in monolingual infants (Rivera-Gaxiola et al., 2005; Kuhl et al., 2006). Previous research has also shown that infants decline in their behavioral capacity to discriminate foreign sounds (Werker and Lalonde, 1988) whereas their native sound discrimination is enhanced (Kuhl et al., 2005). The results of our current study show that the early-head start bilingual infants tested respond to both the Spanish and English sounds at 6-9 months of age, and that they continue to do so at 10-12 months of age. Event-related Potentials (ERPs) strongly suggest that discrimination is phonetic thus supporting the view that native sound discrimination is enhanced.

Children are being followed to examine the impact of learning two languages on the children’s later linguistic and cognitive abilities. This collaboration represents an enhancement to the knowledge, skills, and research of both research groups involved. This study is also receiving support from the LIFE ECO funds.

Additional Graphic Images

Figure 2.

Figure 3.
Description of Graphic Images:
Figure 2. (Top)
Infants were also assessed for general mental, motor and behavioral development as well as for language comprehension and production.
Figure 3. (Bottom)
Event-related Potentials show that infants growing up bilingual continue to respond to both Spanish and English sounds at 10-12 months of age. Monolingual infants respond only to the sounds of their native language at this age.