1. Cognitive studies meet education A NEW FIELD OF APPLIED RESEARCH TO EDUCATION AND ITS PERIMETER A BIT OF HISTORY & WHATS NEWREASONS FOR FAVORING A GOOD ENCOUNTER

2. Birth of a new field Policy-making needs science. (Alberts 2010)200220062008200020052008201120092013 3. 20072012 4. Perimeter of the field: whos who and whats up 5. Sciences cognitives et ducation 2012, Conference at Collge de FranceEns Paris: - Institut dtudes de la cognition - Groupe Compas - CogMaster Fondation La main la pte (Acadmie des sciences, Ens Paris, Ens-Lyon): training & ressources for educatorsFrench Research in cognitive science/Educational institutions 6. Brain & learningNeuroedu cationMind Brain EducationNeuroscie nce and educationBrain decade(Cognitive ) Science of learningLearning sciences1999-2006 OECDCERI: Brain and Learning Project1999-2008 TLRP: programm e neuroscie nce and education2006 Harvard Graduate school of education MBE program1990s Decade of the brain2000sDana Foundatio n Programm e in neuroeduc ation1990sMcDonnel Foundatio n programm e2002 ISLI Internatio nal Society of the learning sciencesInitiatives in member countries (japan, Germany, France, USA, )Ongoing Research in neuroscie nce & learning/l earning disabilities ,1990s2000s USA NSF Science of Learning Centers 7. Brain & learningNeuroedu cationMind Brain EducationNeuroscie nce and educationBrain decade(Cognitive ) Science of learningLearning sciences2003 Mind, Brain, Education Conferenc e at the Accademi a PontificiaTeachings & research in neuroeduc ation at the universitie s of Bristol, UCL, Cambridge , Birbeck collegeMBE Teachings in several USA Graduate Schools2008 SfN Neuroedu cation Summit2008 Dana Foundatio n Art & Brain Initiative/ Neuroedu cation Johns Hopkins University1990sMcDonnel Foundatio n programm e2002 ISLI Internatio nal Society of the learning sciences2005 Cognitive Science & Education conferenc e Acadmie des Sciences1990s2000s USA NSF Science of Learning Centers 8. Brain & learningNeuroedu cation2011 Royal Institution reports 2010 Europe EARLI Sig 22 Neuroedu cation/Co nferencesMind Brain EducationNeuroscie nce and education 2012 Neuroedu cation Quebec Conferenc es, JournalBrain decade2008 Dana Foundatio n Art & Brain Initiative/ Neuroedu 2012 cation Trends in Johns neuroeduc Hopkins ation University Journal(Cognitive ) Science of learningLearning sciences1990sMcDonnel Foundatio n programm e2002 ISLI Internatio nal Society of the learning sciences1990s2000s USA NSF Science of Learning Centers 9. Perimeter of the field: the disciplines involved BiologyCognitive scienceEducationTechnologyNeuroscienceCognitive psychology, evolutionary psychologyEducational psychologyComputer scienceCognitive neuroscienceInformation sciencesSocial sciences RoboticsGenetics neuroscienceDevelopmental Learning and Emerging psychology transfer studies technologies Social Instructional psychology, ant design, wisdom hropology of practice 10. Perimeter of the field: the topics and aims Knowledge& DesignFor better learningEverywhereUnderstanding the many cognitive processes involved in learning & teachingDesign better environments & tools for learning & teachingLearn/Teach more effectivelyFormal and informal settings, School age and lifelong(Measure their effects) Understanding the social processes involved in education & learningUnderstanding the impact of technologies for learning 11. (Fischer et al. 2007) Human beings are unique in their ability to learn through schooling and diverse kinds of cultural instruction. Education plays a key role in cultural transformations: it allows members of a society, the young in particular, to efficiently acquire an ever-evolving body of knowledge and skills that took thousands of years to invent. It is time for education, biology, and cognitive science to join together to create a new science and practice of learning and development. The remarkable new tools of biology and cognitive science open vast possibilities for this emerging field. 12. (Meltzoff et al. 2009) Homo sapiens is also the only species that has developed formal ways to enhance learning: teachers, schools, and curricula. Neuroscientists are beginning to understand the brain mechanisms underlying learning and how shared brain systems for perception and action support social learning. Machine learning algorithms are being developed that allow robots and computers to learn autonomously. New insights from many different fields are converging to create a new science of learning that may transform educational practices. 13. (Sawyer 2008, p. xi)Learning sciences is an interdisciplinary field that studies teaching and learning. Learning scientists study learning in a variety of settings, including not only the more formal learning of school classrooms but also the informal learning that takes place at home, on the job, and among peers. The goal of the learning sciences is to better understand the cognitive and social processes that result in the most effective learning, and to use this knowledge to redesign classrooms and other learning environments so that people learn more deeply and more effectively. The sciences of learning include cognitive science, educational psychology, computer science, anthropology, sociology, information sciences, neurosciences, education, design studies, instructional design, and other fields. 14. (Bransford et al 2000, p. 4) Research from cognitive psychology has increased understanding of the nature of competent performance and the principles of knowledge organization that underlie people's abilities to solve problems in a wide variety of areas Developmental researchers have shown that young children understand a great deal about basic principles of biology and physical causality, about number, narrative, and personal intent, Research on learning and transfer has uncovered important principles for structuring learning experiences that enable people to use what they have learned in new settings. Work in social psychology, cognitive psychology, and anthropology is making clear that all learning takes place in settings that have particular sets of cultural and social norms and expectations and that these settings influence learning and transfer in powerful ways. Neuroscience is beginning to provide evidence for many principles of learning that have emerged from laboratory research, and it is showing how learning changes the physical structure of the brain and, with it, the functional organization of the brain. Emerging technologies are leading to the development of many new opportunities to guide and enhance learning that were unimagined even a few years ago. 15. (Simon 1988, p. 67)Everyone designs who devises courses of action aimed at changing existing situations into preferred ones. The intellectual activity that produces material artifacts is no different fundamentally from the one that prescribes remedies for a sick patient The natural sciences are concerned with how things are . Design, on the other hand, is concerned with how things ought to be, with devising artifacts to attain goals. 16. Cognitive studies meet education A NEW FIELD OF APPLIED RESEARCH TO EDUCATION AND ITS PERIMETER A BIT OF HISTORY & WHATS NEWREASONS FOR FAVORING A GOOD ENCOUNTER 17. William James mild optimismWilliam James 1899: Talks to teachers on psychologyPhilosopher pragmatism Psychology scientific vs introspection 18. Psychology ought certainly to give the teacher radical help. And yet I confess that, acquainted as I am with the height of some of your expectations, I feel a little anxious lest, at the end of these simple talks of mine, not a few of you may experience some disappointment at the net results. In other words, I am not sure that you may not be indulging fancies that are just a shade exaggerated. That would not be altogether astonishing, for we have been having something like a 'boom' in psychology in this country. Laboratories and professorships have been founded, and reviews established. The air has been full of rumors. The editors of educational journals and the arrangers of conventions have had to show themselves enterprising and on a level with the novelties of the day. Some of the professors have not been unwilling to co-operate, and I am not sure even that the publishers have been entirely inert. 'The new psychology' has thus become a term to conjure up portentous ideas withal; and you teachers, docile and receptive and aspiring as many of you are, have been plunged in an atmosphere of vague talk about our science, which to a great extent has been more mystifying than enlightening. 19. There is nothing but the old psychology, which began in Lockes time, plus a little physiology of the brain and senses and the theory of evolution I say moreover that you make a great, a very great mistake, if you think that psychology, being the science of the mind's laws, is something from which you can deduce definite programs and schemes and methods of instruction for immediate schoolroom use. Psychology is a science, and teaching is an art; and sciences never generate arts directly out of themselves. An intermediary inventive mind must make the application, by using its originality. 20. the use of psychological principles certainly narrows the path for experiments and trials. We know in advance, if we are psychologists, that certain methods will be wrong, so our psychology saves us from mistakes. It makes us, moreover, more clear as to what we are about. We gain confidence in respect to any method which we are using as soon as we believe that it has theory as well as practice at its back. it fructifies our independence, and it reanimates our interest, to see our subject at two different angles,to get a stereoscopic view, to be able, at the same time, to represent to ourselves the curious inner elements of his mental machine 21. Edward Thorndikes franck optimismThorndike 1910: The contribution of psychology to education The first to apply principles of psychology to learning, and to education. His theories have been very influential in education in the USA Laws of learning: readiness, exercise, effect (positive) 22. Psychology is the science that backs education, like agriculture depends on botany Just as the science and art of agriculture depend upon chemistry and botany, so the art of education depends upon physiology and psychology. The foundation upon which education builds is the equipment of instincts and capacity given by nature apart from training. Just as knowledge of the peculiar inheritance characteristic of any individual is necessary to efficient treatment of him, so knowledge of the unlearned tendencies of man as a species is necessary to efficient planning for education in general. 23. Psychology contributes to a better understanding of the aims of education by defining them, making them clearer; by limiting them, showing us what can be done and what can not; and by suggesting new features that should be made parts of them. in all cases psychology, by its methods of measuring knowledge and skill, may suggest means to test and verify or refute the claims of any method. Experts in education studying the responses to school situations for the sake of practical control will advance knowledge not only of the mind as a learner under school conditions but also of the mind for every point of view. 24. I hope that it is obvious and needless, and that the relation between psychology and education is not, in the mind of any competent thinker, in any way an exception to the general case that action in the world should be guided by the truth about the world; and that any truth about it will directly or indirectly, soon or late, benefit action. 25. J.B. Watsons planWatson 1913: Psychology as the behaviorist views it Full-fledged behaviorism is a reaction to the use of introspection, to the absence of controlled experiments, and to the focus on consciousness that characterized psychology at the turn of the XX century 26. Behaviorism had the aim of making of psychology a science that can be applied If psychology would follow the plan I suggest, the educator, the physician, the jurist and the business man could utilize our data in a practical way, as soon as we are able, experimentally, to obtain them. Those who have occasion to apply psychological principles practically would find no need to complain as they do at the present time. Ask any physician or jurist today whether scientific psychology plays a practical part in his daily routine and you will hear him deny that the psychology of the laboratories finds a place in his scheme of work. I think the criticism is extremely just. One of the earliest conditions which made me dissatisfied with psychology was the feeling that there was no realm of application for the principles which were being worked out in content terms. 27. The psychology which I should attempt to build up would take as a starting point, first, the observable fact that organisms, man and animal alike, do adjust themselves to their environment by means of hereditary and habit equipments. These adjustments may be very adequate or they may be so inadequate that the organism barely maintains its existence; secondly, that certain stimuli lead the organisms to make the responses. In a system of psychology completely worked out, given the response the stimuli can be predicted; given the stimuli the response can be predicted. In experimental pedagogy especially one can see the desirability of keeping all of the results on a purely objective plane. If this is done, work there on the human being will be comparable directly with the work upon animals. We need to have similar experiments made upon man 28. B.F. Skinners teaching machinesSkinner 1954: Teaching machines Centrality of learning in radical behaviorism Theory of operant conditioning, Reinforcement Behaviorism allows to control learning, not just describing it 29. The learning process is now much better understood. Much of what we know has come from studying the behavior of lower organisms, but the results hold surprisingly well for human subjects. The emphasis in this research has not been on proving or disproving theories but on discovering and controlling the variables of which learning is a function. This practical orientation has paid off, for a surprising degree of control has been achieved. 30. By arranging appropriate contingencies of reinforcement, specific forms of behavior can be set up and brought under the control of specific classes of stimuli. The resulting behavior can be maintained in strength for long periods of time. A technology based on this work has already been put to use in neurology, pharmacology, nutrition, psychophysics, psychiatry, and elsewhere. The analysis is also relevant to education. A student can be taught in the sense that he is induced to engage in new forms of behavior and in specific forms upon specific occasions. 31. ECC2012-13 32. (Bruer 1993 p. 3) In the mid 1950s, behaviorism was the prevailing orthodoxy in American psychological science. In education, behaviorist learning theory emphasized arranging the students environment so that stimuli occurred in a way that would instill the desired stimulusresponse chains. Teachers would present lessons in small, manageable pieces (stimuli), ask students to give answers (responses), and then dispense reinforcement (preferably positive rather than negative) until their students became conditioned to give the right answers.(Bransford et al. 2000 p. 68) A limitation of early behaviorism stemmed from its focus on observable stimulus conditions and the behaviors associated with those conditions. This orientation made it difficult to study such phenomena as understanding, reasoning, and thinkingphenomena that are of paramount importance for education... 33. The cognitive revolution hits the field1956 Cambridge MIT Miller: The magic number 7 Chomsky: A review of B.F. Skinner Verbal Behavior Bruner: A study of thinking 1958 Herbert, Shaw, Simon: Elements of a theory of human problem solving 1960 Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies (Bruner & Miller) 34. Noam Chomsky: A review of BF Skinner Verbal Language One would naturally expect that prediction of the behavior of a complex organism (or machine) would require, in addition to information about external stimulation, knowledge of the internal structure of the organism, the ways in which it processes input information and organizes its own behavior. Every time an adult reads a newspaper, he undoubtedly comes upon countless new sentences which are not at all similar, in a simple, physical sense, to any that he has heard before, and which he will recognize as sentences and understand; he will also be able to detect slight distortions or misprints. Talk of "stimulus generalization" in such a case simply perpetuates the mystery under a new title. These abilities indicate that there must be fundamental processes at work quite independently of "feedback" from the environment. 35. Jerome Bruners (cognitive) process of educationBruner 1960 The process of education1959 Woods Hole conference on teaching science & mathematics USA post-Sputnik era Educational reforms: science teaching & mathematics new textbooks & methods 36. Jean Piagets constructivismPiaget 1957: The construction of reality in the child Swiss psychologist Not directly interested in education but in epistemology: the construction of the representation of reality by the means of the processes of accomodation and assimilationProposed a staged development of intelligence in the child starting from sensorimotor and ending with abstract 37. Piaget (1955) --The successive study of concepts of object, space, causality, and time has led us to the same conclusions: the elaboration of the universe by sensorimotor intelligence constitutes the transition from a state in which objects are centred about a self which believes it directs them, although completely unaware of itself as subject, to a state in which the self is placed, at least practically, in a stable world conceived as independent of personal activity. How is this evolution possible? 38. --It can be explained only by the development of intelligence. Intelligence progresses from a state in which accommodation to the environment is undifferentiated from the assimilation of things to the subjects schemata to a state in which the accommodation of multiple schemata is distinguished from their respective and reciprocal assimilation. To understand this process, which sums up the whole evolution of sensorimotor intelligence, let us recall its steps, starting with the development of assimilation itself. 39. --In its beginnings, assimilation is essentially the utilisation of the external environment by the subject to nourish his hereditary or acquired schemata. It goes without saying that schemata such as those of sucking, sight, prehension, etc., constantly need to be accommodated to things, and that the necessities of this accommodation often thwart the assimilatory effort. But this accommodation remains so undifferentiated from the assimilatory processes that it does not give rise to any special active behaviour pattern but merely consists in an adjustment of the pattern to the details of the things assimilated. 40. ---Hence it is natural that at this developmental level the external world does nor seem formed by permanent objects, that neither space nor time is yet organised in groups and objective series, and that causality is not spatialised or located in things. In other words, at first the universe consists in mobile and plastic perceptual images centred about personal activity. But it is self-evident that to the extent that this activity is undifferentiated from the things it constantly assimilates to itself it remains unaware of its own subjectivity; the external world therefore begins by being confused with the sensations of a self unaware of itself, before the two factors become detached from one another and are organised correlatively. On the other hand, in proportion as the schemata are multiplied and differentiated by their reciprocal assimilations as well as their progressive accommodation to the diversities of reality, the accommodation is dissociated from assimilation little by little and at the same time ensures a gradual delimitation of the external environment and of the subject. 41. Yves et la conservation des quantits 42. Lev Vygotskys role of language and social interaction Vygotsky : The construction of reality in the childRussian psychologist Role of social interaction in cognitive development Zone of proximal development Link between development of language and thinking 43. Then something goes wrong 44. Then new things happen (at several levels): accumulation of knowledge 45. (Simon 2000 p. 115) Exciting research in cognition today combines computer modeling with neuropsychological studies of the functioning of the brain and with the experimental study of human learning and problem solving. This research is helping to test and improve detailed theories of the human symbolic processes used in learning and thinking and to build theories of how skills and knowledge can be taught effectively and efficiently. 46. (Simon 1988, p. 116) We have new top-down research techniques that enable us to observe and model the step-by-step progress of thinking and learning with shorter and shorter steps, even on the scale of seconds and fractions of a second. We have new bottom-up research techniques, such as magnetic resonance imaging and single-cell recording, that enable us to study the localization of the neural processes that occur during thought and learning and to study the chemistry of neurons. With the help of these new tools, we are even beginning to forge links between bottom-up and top-down advances, gaining glimpses of the neurologic bases for human symbolic processes. 47. Just as the revolution in molecular biology changed the whole face of medicine by providing both new understanding of physiological processes and new means of intervention when the processes are out of kilter, so the revolution in the study of the mind, usually called the cognitive revolution, is allowing us to enter a new era of human learning and teaching. This era does not reject the practical knowledge that has built up over millennia but greatly improves and enriches it. Good teachers and good learners may be born, but they cannot reach their potential, or anything close to it, without a deep understanding of the learning processes and how to enhance them. We are becoming more and more able to provide that understanding. 48. diversification of the disciplines that study the mind 49. Cognitive studies meet education A NEW FIELD OF APPLIED RESEARCH TO EDUCATION AND ITS PERIMETER A BIT OF HISTORY & WHATS NEWREASONS FOR FAVORING A GOOD ENCOUNTER 50. societal changes translate into preoccupation for educational systems 51. Learning is a pervasive function but it is not always easy 52. Not a blank slate 53. (Pinker 2002, p. 222) Education is neither writing on a blank slate nor allowing a child's nobility to flower. Rather education is a technology that tries to make up for what the human mind is innately bad at. Children don't have to go to school to learn to walk, talk, recognize objects, or remember the personalities of their friends even though these tasks are much harder than reading, adding, or remembering dates in history... Because much of the content of education is not cognitively natural, the process of mastering it may not always be easy or pleasant, notwithstanding the mantra that learning is fun... they are not necessarily motivated in their cognitive faculties to unnatural tasks like formal mathematics. 54. The human species has created a special technology for the transmission of knowledge 55. Intuition is not enough 56. Pseudo-science & market issues 57. What the new field can do for education Help designing educational tools & methods - That are coherent with the functioning of the human mind- Help evaluating and validating them - Scientific, experimental methods Provide a general knowledge of the human mind for guiding daily actions an decisions Help avoid the slippery slopes and correct mistakes 58. YES BUT HOW????