The First Annual iSLC Student/Postdoc Conference will be a meeting of junior researchers from the NSF-funded Science of Learning Centers (SLCs). During this three-day conference, participants will spend time discussing their common interests for understanding and improving how people learn in a variety of settings and will share and learn about useful methods for conducting research to achieve these goals. The goals of the meeting are to initiate and foster research collaborations between SLCs and to build a network of young researchers who will be the future of the field of learning sciences. These outcomes are to be achieved in a setting in which all of the researchers are brought together to communicate and share their ideas. The scientific importance of the meeting will be in the productive collaborations that are formed. Bringing together young researchers from different geographic areas, disciplines, and domains of expertise will foster an understanding of how learning science problems can be studied from different angles, and create new, integrative ways of attacking those problems in hopes of reaching a sound solution. The solutions produced by these collaborations will simultaneously have a broader impact on the academic field of learning sciences as well as the potential to inform educators, museum curators, parents, or anyone else who makes it their goal to foster learning of children, adolescents or adults.
