Why a Learning Sciences Ph.D. Program?

The University of Illinois at Chicago's commitment to high quality teaching, research, and service to the community is evident throughout its various departments, centers, and institutes in the activities of the faculty and staff. UIC's Great Cities Commitment also calls upon us to work on problems of critical importance to urban areas. This, along with our land grant status, indicates that UIC should also pay attention to serving Illinois and the region in one of our most pressing challenges: education. Faculty in all of UIC's colleges are invested in improving the quality of learning and instruction both for UIC's students and in the city of Chicago. In various departments in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, faculty participate in educating future teachers of secondary school students (e.g., English, Mathematics, Chemistry, Physics, History). Faculty in the Colleges of Medicine and Dentistry are pursuing innovative forms of professional preparation for doctors, dentists, and other health professionals. In the College of Engineering, computer scientists develop and test innovative technologies for enhancing the instructional experiences of K-12 students. Some of the issues that faculty in cognitive psychology and instruction are investigating include the ways that students monitor their learning and their strategies for making sense of information presented in electronic environments such as the world wide web. The many programs in the College of Education address the needs of current and future education professionals through research, direct service activities in the Chicago Public Schools, and through its various degree programs, including teacher preparation and advanced degrees in subject-matter specialties and administrator preparation.

In fact, the breadth and depth of activity at UIC related to Learning Sciences rivals or surpasses that of most other universities in the nation. Due at least in part to hiring and reward strategies instituted as part of the Great Cities program, a multi-disciplinary learning sciences community has begun to form at UIC, and the collaborations growing out of that community have already borne significant fruit in the form of grants and publications. In the course of these activities, questions arise repeatedly about how people learn and effective ways to foster and develop habits of inquiry and critical thinking in learners from pre-K to post-graduate education. Typically, questions focus on issues including the structure of knowledge, methods of inquiry, developmental phases of learning, effective instructional practices, methods and types of assessments, and roles for technology in supporting learning and making opportunities for learning more widely accessible. It is the field of Learning Sciences, with its interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives and methods that can address these questions and prepare future generations of researchers to make these questions the focus of their work. UIC needs an initiative in Learning Sciences that will generate new knowledge around these questions and work collaboratively across the many units of the university to enhance the work of faculty and staff.

Specifically, as part of such an initiative we are proposing an interdisciplinary Ph.D. program whose 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. 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.

Why should a Learning Sciences Ph.D. program be interdisciplinary?