Meltzoff, A. N. (2008, February). Bootstrapping from action analysis to understanding other minds. MIT Conference on Spanning the Socio-cognitive & Computer Modeling Gap. Cambridge, MA.
Kuhl, P. K. (February, 2008). Language and the developing brain. American Association for the Advancement of Science Symposium: Brain Basis of Speech, Boston MA.
Researcher: Patricia Kuhl
Patricia Kuhl was invited to present to an audience of 300 scientists at the AAAS symposium on the “Brain Basis of Speech” at the annual meeting. Dr. Kuhl’s presentation had an international, cross-linguistic focus and she focused on NSF LIFE center studies of monolingual and bilingual children in four countries and work being done with LIFE’s partners at the University of Texas in San Antonio.
2008 LIFE NSF Research Highlights are listed below by category for your reference.
Explorations of diversity and learning
Collaborations between Research and Practice
Early Development
Syntheses Across Research Areas
New Approaches to Assessment
Social Effects on Learning Processes
Learning in informal Settings
Author: James A. Banks and members of the LIFE Diversity Consensus Panel
Institutions: University of Washington and others
Researchers: James A. Banks, Kathryn H. Au, Arnetha F. Ball, Philip Bell, Edmund W. Gordon, Kris D. Gutierrez, Shirley Brice Heath, Carol D. Lee, Yuhshi Lee, Jabari Mahiri, Na’ilah Suad Nasir, Guadalupe Valdes, Min Zhou
Description of Graphic Image: LIFE Diversity Consensus Panel
Project and Outcomes. The Center for Multicultural Education at the University of Washington and the LIFE Center established the LIFE Diversity Consensus Panel. The Panel’s goal was to develop a set of principles that educational practitioners, policy makers, and future researchers could use to understand and build upon the learning that occurs in the homes and community cultures of students from diverse groups. A major assumption of this report is that if educators make use of the informal learning that occurs in the homes and communities of students, the achievement gap between marginalized students and mainstream students can be reduced.
This reports consists of four major parts. Part 1, the Introduction, describes the educational implications of significant changes related to demographics and globalization that are occurring in the U.S. and around the world. Part 2 explicates life-long, life-wide, and life-deep learning and states why these concepts should guide learning inside and outside of schools and other educational institutions. Part 3, which constitutes the main part of this report, focuses on the four principles listed below. Part 4 provides conclusions and recommendations. This report also contains a checklist that educational practitioners can use as a tool to generate dialogue about the four principles identified by the LIFE Diversity Consensus Panel.
PRINCIPLES
1. Learning is situated in broader socio-economic and historical contexts and is mediated by local cultural practices and perspectives.
2. Learning takes place not only in school but also in the multiple contexts and valued practices of everyday lives across the life span.
3. All learners need multiple sources of support from a variety of institutions to promote their personal and intellectual development.
4. Learning is facilitated when learners are encouraged to use their home and community language resources as a basis for expanding their linguistic repertoires.
Learning is facilitated when learners are encouraged to use their home and community language resources as a basis for expanding their linguistic repertoires.
The report mentioned in this document is available online on the LIFE Center web site: http://life-slc.org/?p=498
Investigators: Carol Lee, Phillip Bell, Na’ilah Nasir, Nora Sabelli
Institutions: Northwestern University, University of Washington, Stanford University, SRI International
Description of Graphic Image:
Snapshot of the informal conversations around which the workshop was organized.
Project and Outcomes Description:
There’s no doubt that diverse cultural, linguistic and economic backgrounds affect how people learn. But how can diversity be consistently and appropriately addressed in research on learning?
Learning scientists recently tackled this problem and started to devise a framework to guide future work at a “Hot Topic” workshop hosted by the LIFE Center and Northwestern University researcher Carol Lee.
Terms like “diversity,” “community,” and “multilingualism” hide the various factors - like race and economic status - learning researchers attempt to quantify and control in their studies. That makes the research results less useful when others try to translate them into new ways of teaching.
It’s important that researchers understand the range and meaning of these variable factors so their findings are comparable and can be generalized to different situations. To make progress, they must agree on descriptions of cultural diversity and diversity based on economic and social status, language, race, ethnicity, and community resources.
At the interdisciplinary meeting, participants worked on a framework tied to an understanding of culture as fluid, changing, and rooted in social interaction. The framework will guide researchers’ work and help them examine and communicate their results. It also will challenge researchers to consider how culture, diversity and multiple language use is relevant to their studies, and will allow more careful data analysis.
Eventually, LIFE Center researchers hope to consider guidelines and definitions that spring from learning theory and account for the varying nature of diversity. They hope the workshop’s results will lead to more knowledge and have real effects on how people learn.
Organizers: Shirley Malcom, AAAS and ECO Board Chair of LIFE, and Nora Sabelli, LIFE.
Institutions: American Association for the Advancement of Science, SRI International, University of Washington and Stanford University
Researchers: John Bransford, Patricia Kuhl, Philip Bell, Reed Stevens (University of Washington); Roy Pea, Daniel Schwartz, Shelley Goldman (Stanford University)
Description of Graphic Image:
Snapshots of the Question and Answer session and of the discussion: researchers John Bransford and Phillip Bell and Teacher Yvonne Brannum.
Project and Outcomes. Both teachers and researchers have insights about issues of human learning that are important to understand more deeply. Typically, however, there are few opportunities to connect the wisdom of practice with efforts by the research community.
To address these and other issues, an open conversation between researchers and teachers was organized by the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center and with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Six LIFE researchers were joined by a similar number of teachers from the District of Columbia area, chosen for their past collaborations with AAAS.
Everyone came together to share problems, techniques, knowledge and strategies and to break down the boundaries that limit how research is put into practice. The meeting format was unique, as it relied on questions based on teaching practices to “translate” between research questions and practice issues. The discussion identified implications for policy and for refining both research questions and classroom practice, focusing on issues of common interest such as research that leads to understanding the knowledge that students bring to school and the possible uses of homework to link parents with school.
An audience of researchers, faculty, policymakers, and others got a chance to ask questions and comment on the need for open conversations around research and practice. Based on comments and requests from the audience, the LIFE center plans to follow the same format to continue the conversation in other meetings. Together, the teachers and researchers hope the discussion will drive new policies to support effective teaching and new research to improve learning.
Organizers: Bellevue School District, Bellevue Schools Foundation & LIFE Center
Researchers: John Bransford, Hank Clark, Drue Gawel, Tiffany Lee, Rachel Phillips, Kari Shutt, Susann Smith & Nancy Vye (University of Washington)
Description of Graphic Image:
John Bransford interacts with Bellevue School District parents, teachers, administrators and school board members on how parents can help their students learn.
Project and Outcomes:
Researchers from the LIFE Center at the University of Washington and Bellevue School District (BSD) leadership organized an open event for BSD parents focused on learning principles and strengthening home-school connections.
Dr. John Bransford, LIFE Center Director, was the keynote speaker at the Partnering with Parents for Academic Success event. Dr. Bransford highlighted strategies for connecting learning in homes, communities and school settings, and the unique role of parents in supporting children’s learning. Following Dr. Bransford’s keynote, break-out sessions lead by LIFE researchers and BSD principals were held with parents.
The event resulted in new insights on the challenges parents face in supporting school learning - in particular, challenges related to social, familial and contextual dynamics. Parents were helped to see their students as novices who needed to learn inquiry at home, and the event deepened BSD principals’ understanding of school-home connections through a “learning by teaching” experience where they co-facilitated sessions with LIFE researchers.
Description of Graphic Image:
Parents and teachers discuss learning principles with LIFE researchers and BSD principals and teachers, and connect them to upcoming lessons and their children’s experiences.
Investigators: Doris Chin, Marily Oppezzo, Cathy Chase, Britte Cheng, and Daniel L. Schwartz
Institution: Stanford University
Description of Graphic Image: Students teach computer agents that then appear in an on-line homework game show where the host asks the agents questions and students “wager” on whether their agent will answer correctly.
Project and Outcomes Description:
“Socializing Homework”
Homework is a sore point in many homes. Students find homework less desirable than doing chores and school work (in school). Parents frequently discuss their frustration with homework. Among the many possible causes of the tension, homework often takes the dullest part of school - isolated and repetitive seat work - and transports it to home where it blocks some of the best parts of informal learning - social interaction and games. Therefore, we designed an internet homework environment that was highly social and game-like. Students log in to an environment that includes chat, so students can communicate with one another from home. In the environment, called the AAA-Game- Show, students teach a computer program called a Teachable Agent, so they learn by teaching. Their agents then appear in the Game Show and answer questions asked by the automated game show host. Students wager on whether their agents will answer questions correctly, and they chat with other students about their agents’ performances, their scores, and increasingly, about science topics.
In a study with 6th-grade children learning about global warming, one group of students answered the questions themselves in the game show instead of an agent. In the other condition, students’ agents answered the questions. The latter condition did more homework overall, and they showed stronger learning gains. For example, when given a chance in class to learn a new related set of concepts from a reading passage, students who had worked with agent version of the homework environment learned more.
Figure 2. An example of a teachable agent. Students teach the agent by creating nodes and links. Using generic artificial intelligence techniques, the agent can answer questions using its map and highlighting its change of inference.
Investigators: Aaron Shon, Joshua Storz, Andrew N. Meltzoff, Rajesh Rao
Institution: University of Washington: Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences
Figure 1. Robot interacting with a human.
Social Robots
Humans learn from observing the actions of others. An interdisciplinary research team within the LIFE SLC Center is bringing together computer scientists, engineers, and child development experts to help design social robots that can learn from observing others, rather than from being preprogrammed with a limited set of fixed skills. Several models have been proposed for imitation learning in humans and robots. However, few proposals offer a framework for imitation learning in noisy, real-world environments where the imitator must learn and act under real-time performance constraints such as a learner is likely to encounter in everyday life. We have developed a novel probabilistic framework for imitation learning in natural environments. Bayesian algorithms, based on Meltzoff and Moore’s AIM theory for action imitation in children, implement the core of this imitation learning framework. Our model is computationally efficient, allowing real-time learning and imitation in an active stereovision robotic head and on a humanoid robot. The research program successfully used simulated and real-world robotics results to demonstrate the validity of the approach. We propose a future research agenda promoting interaction between cognitive psychology, developmental science, and robotics. By using a biologically plausible model - child development - we hope to create social robots that develop and learn. We are also using robots to explore the hypothesis that humans, including children, learn best from entities that are socially responsive and interactive.
Source: Shon, A., Storz, J. J., Meltzoff, A. N., Rao, R. P. N. (2007). A cognitive model of imitative development in humans and machines. International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, 4, 387-406.
