Learning Sciences and Policy (LSAP) Courses

Fall 2010

Design of Educational Systems, PSY 2477 & LSAP 3595-1090
Louis Gomez & Christian Schunn
Tuesday and Thursday, 1-2:15pm

Students will work in teams to enact an innovative educational design process with real projects and real clients. The educational systems being (re)designed may include a museum exhibit, a high school robotics unit, a college lab course, or a professional development sequence for mathematics teachers. Throughout the process we will be learning about and addressing constraints from (1) organizational and policy contexts; (2) learning sciences; and (3) disciplinary content. The course will be interdisciplinary in that it will draw students with diverse backgrounds to form the design teams.

Measurement of Teaching in the Content Areas (Grades K-12), LSAP 3595-1070
Richard Correnti & Lindsay Clare Matsumura
Mondays, 4:30 to 7pm, WWPH 5702

This course will examine the various ways scholars have tried to quantify and understand the practice of teaching in classroom settings. The course is meant to provide a broad exposure to the methods used to examine classroom instruction in content area disciplines – with a special focus in Mathematics and Literacy (where most of the work has been concentrated). We will consider the different dimensions of teacher practice that are important for student learning. This framework will be important for mapping out how researchers currently attempt to measure those dimensions in practice. Students will gain practical experience trying to utilize these measures in order to understand their application and better understand the strengths/weaknesses of various measures. An additional frame for the course will focus on validity concerns – e.g., how to establish the validity of instructional measures with particular emphasis on the predictive validity of measures on student learning. Finally, we will also consider whether and how measures of teaching can be used to improve instruction in K-12 classrooms.

Organizational Perspectives on Educational Improvement, LSAP 3595-1050
Jennifer Russell
Tuesdays, 4:30-7:10

One way to see the act of education is that it is essentially about what occurs between teachers and learner. In other words the key unit of analysis is the classroom or activity structure. The classroom is important, but teaching and learning are also shaped by their context. Individuals are situated in organizations, which are situated in broader social, cultural, and political environments. Consequently, reform and improvement efforts must not only take seriously individual factors, they must understand the ways in which individual action is enabled and constrained by organizational and environmental contexts.
This seminar will focus on schools as organizations drawing on theoretical and empirical work grounded in organizational theory. We begin the course with readings that allow us to come to terms with some of the realities of schools and some of the results that school organizations produce for young people. We then interrogate the institutional, organizational, and day-to-day contexts of work in schools. Next we explore how reform efforts targeting organizational features can intervene and perhaps, improve teaching and learning. In order to grapple with the concepts from the literature, students will analyze several cases of organizational improvement efforts and conduct a small study in teams examining an improvement effort in a local educational organization.

Research Methods for Learning Sciences and Policy, LSAP 3595
Kimberley Gomez
Wednesdays, 3:30 - 6:10pm

The course is focused on research methods and analysis as they apply to the diverse research problems that characterize the Learning Sciences. The goal is to have students develop an appreciation of the range of research methods and approaches that can be applied to problems and issues in cognition and learning and how questions and methods align. In considering these issues we also explore some of the current debate about scientific methods in educational research and issues of philosophy and epistemology as related to research methods.

The course introduces, through theoretical and empirical readings, the multiple theoretical perspectives and research paradigms that are employed by Learning Scientists in order to understand the complexities associated with the nature and conditions of human learning and cognition. These methods include a variety of forms of quantitative and qualitative research as well as design-based experiments and research. Students will read, discuss, and analyze research studies and conceptual pieces that are seminal to the Learning Sciences field. The course aims to deepen students skills in, and understanding of, the components of scientific arguments and execution of the research design and analysis process through analyzing and critiquing issues involved at various stages of research activities. The course concerns both the theory and practice of research. A central aim is to articulate key research issues that arise when creating, studying, and analyzing learning environments and evaluate various efforts and the results of those efforts in the context of these questions. An important emphasis in this course is on when, and how, methods and forms of data and accompanying analytic techniques may be used to address a significant research question, often as part of larger program of research that demands multiple methodological approaches to make substantial empirical and theoretical progress. Students will consider how a research problem is framed in order to conduct a rigorous and credible line of inquiry and the range of methods that may applicable to facets of the problem -- beyond basic hypothesis testing and experimental design.

Spring 2010

Educational Policy
Mary Kay Stein & Richard Correnti
3 credits, Mondays from 1 to 4pm, WWPH 4301
School quality is at the forefront of public concern. Numerous (and at times conflicting) educational policies have been enacted at the federal, state, and district level all aimed at improving students’ learning opportunities. The difficulty of substantively improving teaching and learning through externally imposed policies, however, has been well-documented. In this course we examine theoretical and methodological approaches to understanding educational policymaking and the processes by which policies are (and are not) translated into practice. Specific questions we address in this course include: How are “problems” framed to constituents and how does this influence policy implementation? How do educators “make sense” of policies in the context of their prior beliefs and experiences? How does variation in human and social capital resources in schools and districts influence policy implementation? What are the “learning demands” for individuals and organizations entailed by specific policies? And, how can policies be designed to more effectively support improvements in teaching and learning?

Research Methods for Learning Sciences and Policy
Kim Gomez & Phillip Herman
3 credits, Tuesdays from 9 to 12pm
This course will review current methods and approaches to conducting research in education with a focus on developing and studying integrative (mixed-methods/complementary methods) research designs. Models for different research designs and analytic approaches (and the epistemology informing these designs and approaches) include experimental and quasi-experimental designs, quantitative syntheses of research findings (meta-analyses), case studies, ethnography, discourse analysis, historical (document) analysis, and design experiments.

Building Network Improvement Communities as an Agent of Reform
Louis Gomez & Anthony Bryk (President, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching)
3 credits, Tuesdays from 3 to 5:40pm
In this seminar we explore literature that might lead to understanding about the construction of diverse networks of practitioners, designers, researchers, and developers, from the public and private sectors, that collaborate on high leverage problems in school improvement and organizational transformation. How are arrangements created to enable diverse communities to work together? We have come to call these arrangements Networked Improvement Communities (NICs). The aim of the seminar is to identify NIC-like organizations and characterize their elements. We explore organizations inside and  outside of education that appear to be NICs.. We seek to understand what data and social practice (e.g. regular meetings) allow the organization to support organizational improvement. We will read about organizations include the Linux development organization, the Semi-Conductor Industry Association, and perhaps Wikipedia.  What these organizations have in common is that they are all networked and distributed, but engage in significant degrees of collaboration across  formal organizational boundaries to get work done.  But precisely how do they do this?  What rules and roles are created? How are responsibilities allocated and taken up (evidence + social authority to adjudicate conflicts etc.) across a network?  What incentives operate to catalyze participation? We are especially interested in networks that have intentional goals – to build something together—although these goals might be multiple and broad.  Ultimately we will attempt to apply our insights to educational organizations and improvement.

Learning Sciences and Educational Change
Kevin Crowley & Jim Greeno
3 credits, Tuesdays from 12 to 3pm, LRDC 1st Floor
This course provides an intense introduction to the learning sciences and their role in helping to support sustainable educational change. The course is designed for students interested in the intersection learning research and educational practice/policy, and is appropriate for Ph.D. students who bring background in either. In an effort to maximize the connections between learning research and educational change, the course is organized around the three major learning sciences discoveries with direct implications for how educational experiences should be organized. Although widely supported by learning sciences research, these  claims are often in direct conflict with how education systems  actually operate – especially schools. The claims are: 1) The form of cognitive learning that education should target is understanding; 2) Participation and positional identity are core educational outcomes; 3) Schools are a special case of a learning environment. Learning is organized differently in different settings, which has direct implications for what is learned, how it is learned, who learns it, and why they do (or don’t) engage with learning. As we consider each of these claims, we explore how learning science gets done, introducing forms of research that allow us to get beyond simplistic distinctions between "basic" and "applied" science, including the notion of design experiment in creating classroom learning communities, technological learning environments, and informal experiences.

Skill Acquisition (PSYC 2450)
Christian Schunn
3 credits, Mondays & Wednesdays from 1:00 to 2:15, LRDC 814
This course will introduce the foundational theories and issues in research on skill acquisition, problem solving, and reasoning.  Core questions include: what is the nature of expert problem solving and reasoning, what changes cognitively as an individual moves from novice to expert, and what factors influence how quickly people get to expert performance? This course focuses on the skills that experts develop rather than the knowledge they have, although the interrelationship of knowledge and skill will be examined. We will also examine research methods used in this area — in other words, how human problem solving and reasoning can be studied scientifically, and why the results of experimental investigations support particular theories of human skill acquisition, problem solving, and reasoning.

Fall 2009

Professional Learning in the Content Areas
Lindsay Clare Matsumura and Richard Correnti
3 credits, Tuesdays from 1 to 3:50pm, 5700 WWPH

We will be exploring different approaches to professional development for actors across the levels of the school system and the research and theories that inform those approaches. Various members of the Institute for Learning (IFL), and people affiliated with the IFL, will be engaging the students in professional development sessions (e.g., a session designed for middle school principals that focuses on learning to identify features of rigorous math tasks led by Melissa Boston; a session for district leaders that describes effective, coherent, professional development led by Vicki Bill, a session for principals and coaches focused on Questioning the Author led by Donna Bickel, etc.). The idea is for the students to experience the professional development as opposed to only reading about it, and to have the opportunity to talk with the developers of these sessions about why they made their specific design choices. The students will work in teams to develop a professional development session of their own, and will each write a final paper describing the theory and research underlying the design of their session drawing on the course readings.

Organizational Perspectives on Educational Improvement (LSAP 3595-1010, #35893)
Jennifer Russell and Louis Gomez
3 credits, Wednesdays from 1 to 3:50pm,  5700 WWPH

The class will examine theoretical and empirical work on educational organizations, with an emphasis on the features of organizations and organizational systems which present opportunities and barriers to improving teaching and learning. We will apply concepts from the literature to cases of real organizations. And students will work in teams to collect some data in an organization examining efforts to introduce a new innovation or implement some improvement effort.

Spring 2009

Assessment & Accountability (PSYED 3589)
Lindsay Clare Matsumura and Laura Hamilton
3 Credits 1/5-4/25; Thursdays 9:30am - 12:10pm