Featured People Activity

Bell Testifies to Congress on Informal Science Learning

LIFE researcher Philip Bell served as a witness before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science and Technology’s subcommittee on Research and Science Education. Bell, who co-chaired the National Research Council’s Committee on Learning Science in Informal Environments, testified about informal science education a hearing examining the role of informal environments in promoting science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning. The Science and Technology Committee has made STEM learning a top priority and is investigating how out-of-school experiences can promote engagement in the sciences and help attract more Americans to STEM fields.

NSF SLC Symposium

From Synapse to Schoolroom: The Science of Learning

Event date and Location
October 13th, 2006
Georgia World Conference Center (room C304), Atlanta, Georgia

Purpose
The NSF-funded Satellite Symposium is designed to achieve two goals: (1) bring faculty and students of the three existing NSF Science of Learning together to present and discuss research projects central to their missions, and (2) to introduce other scientists and practitioners interested in the science of learning to the work of the SLCs.

Description
The Satellite consists of two broad sessions. The first focuses on Memory, Planning, and Cognition with presentations from Boston’s CELEST center and discussants John Bruer from the McDonnell Foundation and Elsbeth Stern from the Max Plank Institute for Human Development in Berlin. The second session focuses on Language, Social Cognition, and Education with presentations from Seattle’s LIFE Center, Boston’s CELEST Center and Pittsburgh’s PSLC Center, with discussants John Bruer and John Geake from the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Oxford. Student posters were solicited from all three centers and will be presented in the early evening during a social in which presenters, attendees, and student can discuss issues related to the science of learning.

Participants
The joint group of NSF Science of Learning Centers consists of the University to Washington’s LIFE Center, Boston University’s CELEST Center, and CMU-University of Pittsburgh’s Center. The Satellite agenda includes faculty presentations from all three groups, as well as student posters, which will be presented during the social gathering in the evening. The meeting agenda is given below.

Agenda
Introductions and Opening Remarks (Moderator: Pat Kuhl)

  • 9:30-9:50 Dr. Wanda Ward, Deputy Assistant Director, Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences; Dr. Soo-Siang Lim, Program Director, Science of Learning Centers Program
  • 9:50-10:00 John Bransford, LIFE Center, Chair of the SLC Centers

Morning Session: Memory, Planning, and Cognition (Moderator: Stephen Grossberg)

  • 10:00-10:30 Earl Miller, Neural Bases of Categories, Concepts, and Cognition, CELEST
  • 10:30-11:00 Stephen Grossberg, Cortical Dynamics of Category Learning, Working Memory, and Sequential Planning, CELEST
  • 11:00-11:30 Michael Hasselmo, Learning and Episodic Memory: Encoding and Retrieval, CELEST
  • 11:30-12:00 Gail Carpenter, Rule Discovery from Learned Cognitive Categories, CELEST
  • 12:00-12:45 Discussion: Neural Basis of Concepts: John Bruer, The McDonnell Foundation; Elsbeth Stern, Max Plank Institute for Human Development
  • 12:45-2:00 Break

Afternoon Session: Language, Social Cognition, and Education (Moderator: Pat Kuhl)

  • 2:00-2:30 Pat Kuhl, Language Acquisition and the “Bilingual Brain,” LIFE
  • 2:30-3:00 Maritza Rivera-Gaxiola and Harriett Romo, Infant Head-Start Learners: Brain and Behavioral Measures and Family Assessments, LIFE
  • 3:00-3:30 Frank Guenther, Brain Mechanisms of Speech Perception and Production, CELEST
  • 3:30-4:00 Charles Perfetti, Learning of a New Writing System, PSLC
  • 4:00-4:30 Andrew Meltzoff and David Liu, Imitation and Social Understanding, LIFE
  • 4:30-5:00 Ken Koedinger, Education Influences on Neuroscience, PSLC
  • 5:00-5:30 Discussion: Neuroscience, Learning and Education: John Bruer, The McDonnell Foundation; John Geake, Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Oxford

Social and Graduate Student and Post-doctoral Fellow Poster Presentations
5:45 - 7:30

  • Sashank Varma, Janet Go & Dan Schwartz, LIFE
    Towards an educationally relevant cognitive neuroscience
  • David Liu, Andrew Meltzoff, & Henry Wellman, LIFE
    Neural correlates of reasoning about specific mental states
  • Raj Raizada, Dan Schwartz, Kieran Omahony, John Bransford, & Pat Kuhl, LIFE
    Trial-and-error learning and the neural reward system
  • Lotus Lin, Toshi Imada, & Pat Kuhl, LIFE
    Language-specific effects on mental calculation: An fMRI study in bilinguals
  • Raj Raizada & Pat Kuhl, LIFE
    Socioeconomic status predicts Broca’s area specialization in 5-year-old children
  • Barbara Conboy & Pat Kuhl. LIFE
    Event-related potentials to Spanish and English syllables in 11 month-old infants after short-term exposure to Spanish
  • Max Versace & Stephen Grossberg. CELEST
    Learning and cognitive information processing in thalamocortical assemblies: Unifying spikes, synchronous oscillations, and resonance
  • Daniel Franklin & Stephen Grossberg, CELEST
    A neural model of normal and amnesic learning and memory: Conditioning, adaptive timing, neurotrophins and hippocampus
  • Krishna Srihasam, Daniel Bullock, & Stephen Grossberg, CELEST
    A neural model for coordinating saccades and smooth pursuit eye movements during visual tracking and perception of objects moving with variable speeds
  • Arash Fazl, Stephen Grossberg, & Ennio Mingolla, CELEST
    View-invariant object recognition: How coordination of spatial and surface-based attentional shrouds controls category learning
  • Ruth Wylie, PSLC
    Developing intelligent tutoring systems for language learning
  • Lisa Anthony, J. Yang, & Ken Koedinger, PSLC
    How handwriting helps learning: Evidence from a user study in algebra equation solving.
  • Gwen Frishkoff, Charles Perfetti, Kevyn Collins-Thompson, Jamie Callan, PSLC
    Techniques for accurate assessment of word knowledge (TAAWK): A new framework for integrated computational and neuroscientific studies of word learning

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