Cognitive Science and Instruction: Pasteur’s Quadrant in the Learning Sciences
Friday, 8:30 AM - 10:15 AM
Hynes CC 310

Speaker: David Klahr, Carnegie Mellon University
Chair: Elizabeth Albro, Institute of Educational Sciences, U.S. Department of Education

Biographical Sketch
David Klahr received his undergraduate degree from MIT in Electrical Engineering (1960), and his Ph.D. in 1968 from Carnegie Mellon's Graduate School of Industrial Administration (“GSIA”, now the Tepper School of Business) in Organizations and Social Behavior. From 1966-69, he was an Assistant Professor at the University of Chicago with joint appointments in the School of Business and the Department of Mathematics. In 1968 – 69 was a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Stirling, Scotland, and a Visiting Fulbright lecturer at the London School of Business. He returned to Carnegie Mellon with joint appointment in GSIA and Psychology in 1969, and became Professor of Psychology in 1976. He served as Head of the Psychology Department from 1983 to 1993, and is currently Director of the Program in Interdisciplinary Education Research (PIER), a doctoral training grant funded by the Office of Education. http://www.cmu.edu/pier. Throughout his career, Klahr has focused on the analysis of complex cognitive processes in such diverse areas as voting behavior, college admissions, consumer choice, peer review, problem solving and scientific reasoning. He pioneered the application of information processing analysis to questions of cognitive development, and, in collaboration with Iain Wallace, formulated the first computer simulation models to account for children's performance on a variety of Piagetian tasks and other types of problems. Dr. Klahr's most recent research has investigated the cognitive processes that support children's understanding of the fundamental principles underlying scientific thinking. This work includes both basic research with pre-school children and more applied classroom studies of how to improve the teaching of experimental science in elementary school. He has worked in a wide variety of schools in the Pittsburgh region, focusing on the relative effectiveness of different instructional methods for teaching children how to design and interpret simple experiments. He is a Fellow of the APA, a Charter Fellow of the APS, on the Governing Board of the Cognitive Development Society, a Member of the Society for Research in Child Development, and the Cognitive Science Society. He was an Associate Editor of Developmental Psychology and has served on the editorial boards of several cognitive science journals, as well as on the NSF's subcommittee on Memory and Cognitive Processes, and the NIH's Human Development and Aging Study Section. He has served on three Committees of the National Research Council: the Committee on Foundations of Educational Assessment ( Knowing What Students Know, National Academies Press, 2001) , the Committee on Research in Education ( Advancing Scientific Research in Education, National Academies Press, 2004 ) and the Committee on Science Learning ( Taking Science to School: Learning and Teaching Science in Grades K-8, National Academies Press, 2007). He also serves as member of the Advisory Board for the Brain, Mind & Behavior Program of the James S. McDonnell Foundation.

Abstract
How can research in cognitive development generate usable knowledge for science instruction? How can issues raised by classroom practice drive the agenda of laboratory studies of cognitive development? In this talk I address both of these questions by describing the reciprocal influence of basic and applied research – that is, on the science and engineering aspects of evidence-based instructional practice. I draw on research from my own lab that has focused mainly on a few domain-general procedures in elementary school science, and I expand this core to consider, more broadly, the way that our current scientific knowledge base can be used to change the nature of early science instruction.