UW nets $12.4 million to study learning

Kyle Arnold and Kayla Webley
2004-10-01
The Daily

The UW netted $12.4 from the National Science Foundation yesterday, enabling experts from three areas of the University to study the ways people learn.

The grant will develop the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center, a joint effort between the UW, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon University, totaling $36.5 million.

"We will bring together different research professions, brain science people, psychologists and education experts in this project," said Philip Bell, co-principal investigator for the grant

The LIFE Center will use UW experts from the School of Medicine's neurology program, with professors and assistant professors from the psychology department and the College of Education.

Bell, an assistant professor of educational psychology, said the grant will fund 60 researchers at the Center. Those researchers will be made up of graduate students and post-doctoral students.

"Within my group the kind of work that we have done is gone into the classroom and get them to learn science by getting them to debate," said Bell. "We'll be looking at what kids learn about science from books, classrooms and other areas.

According to Bell, researchers in other departments, like professors Patricia Kuhl in hearing and speech sciences and Andrew Metzloff in psychology, will be focusing on projects like how bilingual students learn math.

Kuhl and Metzloff were co-principal investigators for the grant. Leading the grant team was education professor John Bransford.

According to Reed Stevens, a co-principal investigator and assistant professor of education, studying the way children learn will be particularly valuable.

"Mostly young people learn in all the settings outside of school ... playing sports and talking with their family at dinner," said Stevens, an assistant professor of education. "Kids spend at least 4 times as much time outside of school. We don't know how this learning connects with what they learn in school."

According to Reed, the unique thing about the Center will be a focus on formal, informal and implicit learning, studying how humans learn in all capacities.

"Kids spend 79 percent of their times outside of school," said Bell. "It's important to find out how they're learning outside and inside of school."