This award to New York University will provide support for a workshop on Mind, Brain, and Education scheduled to be held in New York City in January 2020. It will bring researchers from multiple fields (e.g., education research, cognitive science, neuroscience) together with education practitioners (e.g., teachers, district leaders, parents) to share ideas about brain research and STEM learning in both formal and informal contexts. It will be an opportunity for researchers to share the results of their cutting-edge work on such topics as numerical processing and STEM problem solving with educators and, in turn, for educators to have direct input to researchers about issues concerning the translation to practice. It will also provide educators with the opportunity to help drive basic and applied research agendas. The goal of the workshop is to develop new models for sustained collaborations among researchers, educators, parents, and policy influencers. The project is funded by the EHR Core Research program, which supports fundamental research that advances the research literature on STEM learning.
The workshop will explore innovative models of interaction between researchers and educators in the nascent field of Mind, Brain, and Education, centering on collaboratories - table discussions on specific topics led by a range of top experts so as to foster dialogue - as well as networking sessions, rapid-fire talks, keynote addresses, and a session devoted to discovering new models for sustained interaction of the gathered communities. The specific topics will may include cognitive neuroscientific findings related to inducing durable memories in STEM, cognitive findings about the geometric intuitions that underlie formal learning in mathematics, establishing researcher-practitioner partnerships in STEM education, teaching science at the secondary school level, supporting museum-university collaborations, and best practices in public outreach.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
