Program Overview

The UIC Learning Sciences Ph.D is an interdisciplinary program focused on Learning in the Disciplines. The program’s primary objective is to prepare researchers who are equipped with the knowledge and inquiry skills necessary to address questions fundamental to how people learn specific subject matter areas such as mathematics or chemistry. Addressing subject-matter learning questions requires an understanding of three bodies of knowledge:

• General issues of learning, instruction, and assessment – typically the purview of cognitive and educational psychology;
• The instrumentality of technologies for enhancing and supporting learning, instruction, and assessment – typically the focus of computer scientists;
• The structure and content of the specific disciplines that people are learning - typically the purview of faculty in individual disciplines.

The Ph.D. program in Learning Sciences at UIC intends to create a unique program that brings together these three knowledge bases and methods of inquiry to create a community of scholarship and research that will focus on learning in the disciplines. In doing so, this effort reflects the existing interests and investment of faculty across the many colleges of the university.

The Ph.D. program also offers students unique opportunities for future employment, based on their training in education research focused on specific learning challenges. These opportunities will prepare them for positions throughout the K-16 continuum and also within the corporate sector.

This program will accomplish this training through a combination program of study, including core courses specific to the Learning Sciences.

Goals of the Ph.D. Program

The UIC Learning Sciences Ph.D. Program has a set of goals chosen to reflect our expectation that the graduates will have unique training in how to examine and propose solutions to pressing needs in learning in and outside of conventional classroom settings. These goals include:

• Produce graduates with demonstrated strength in the application of learning sciences to the theoretical and practical design and analysis challenges found within and across disciplinary contexts.
• Establish a community of faculty and graduate students in pursuit of common interdisciplinary interests in learning sciences, enhancing UIC’s capacity to address significant interdisciplinary questions at the nexus of research and practice.
• Prepare scholar/researchers who are equipped with the unique disciplinary and methodological knowledge necessary to conduct rigorous research on fundamental issues of learning across diverse populations.
• Prepare cohorts of scholars/researchers/teachers who in their own practice can integrate deep disciplinary content learning and the assessment of that learning in environments that foster active and engaged learners.
• Enhance the intellectual infrastructure and context at UIC for researching and improving undergraduate, Master’s, and Ph. D. level educational programs.

Educational Benefits of an Interdisciplinary Degree

There are several educational reasons for an interdisciplinary degree. Many problems in teaching and learning would benefit from individuals trained to consider teaching and learning in general and in a specific context. As is discussed in more detail in Section 8.2, such individuals are much needed in all sectors of the educational system, both in traditional settings and in the private sector. It may be possible to address some of these broad needs within traditional disciplines. But the Learning Sciences Graduate Program will actually address these needs in different areas simultaneously and with greater effect. Consider, for example, these three cases, each of which illustrates a particular problem that has occurred in our traditional graduate programs already:

• Computer scientists are hampered in efforts to plan and implement science education lessons within a computer science program; an interdisciplinary approach that uses work in K-8 science learning will remove this barrier.
• Chemists interested in knowing better the steps that occur as a college student come to a thorough understanding of mechanism; interdisciplinary training that incorporates educational psychology perspectives will address this.
• Someone looking to train for a leadership position in training high school teachers in inquiry teaching of science needs to know the science well; an interdisciplinary program would provide expertise in learning and in science.

The interdisciplinary Learning Sciences Graduate Program will do more than provide overlapping training to these different students (a well coordinated cross-listing plan might do that). By housing these and other students in a single program, each individual graduate will learn much more about the problem of how to apply education, psychology, and computer science to learning of specific content, for each person will see how this general problem is solved in different ways.

Research possibilities within Learning Sciences graduate study

A sample of questions of interest to the faculty and graduate student members of the UIC Learning Sciences program would include:

• How knowledge of the development of cognition can aid in the analysis and design of effective literacy, mathematics, or science instruction.
• How general principles of cognitive development and principles of domain-specific knowledge and expertise are enacted in designed learning environments.
• How the social and cultural dimensions of learning manifest themselves in both formal and informally designed learning environments and how these can be systematically assessed and understood.
• How the human capacity for embodied, multi-modal learning interacts with the various technologies available for fostering learning.

How new forms of assessment can feed back into the teaching and learning process to continually inform and enhance instructional processes.