This proposal requests funds to support the annual Inter-Science of Learning Centers (i-SLC) Conference, organized by the graduate students and postdoctoral fellows of the 6 Science of Learning Centers (SLCs). This event has served as a vital venue for exchanging research findings across the SLCs, sharing resources and stimulating career development opportunities for Center trainees. This highly productive activity has resulted in cross-center collaborations, including cross-center student exchanges for additional training in other laboratories.
This year, the conference will be hosted by the NSF-funded Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC) in San Diego, CA on April 21-23, 2012. To capitalize on the host-center's primary research focus on the temporal dynamics of learning and how time and timing influences learning, the iSLC 2012 will have the general theme of "Time, Mind, and Education Interwined". Requested funds will be used to pay for conference facilities at the University of California San Diego (UCSD) and to cover participants' costs of attending, including travel and per diem
Earlier iSLC conferences experiment in various ways to maximize the effectiveness with which the meeting meets its objectives, and each evolution of this event reflects deliberate efforts to improve the meeting based on feedback from prior meetings. Individual students and postdoctoral fellows attending iSLC will benefit from visiting UCSD, learning from experiences of their peers, and by being exposed to new and alternative methodologies and paradigms. Most importantly, they will be provided with opportunities to participate actively in the cross-center, and inter-disciplinary network that will provide support for them in their careers. Since most graduate students and postdoctoral fellows typically attend field-specific conferences with little opportunity to interact with peers outside of their disciplinary niches, this annual event is addressing the need to provide the infrastructure for a national, and even international, interdisciplinary network of young scholars who are likely to continue to cooperate and collaborate throughout their future careers. This year, the trainees are proactively implementing several strategies to broaden the participation of underrepresented minorities in science, by leveraging on-going efforts at their respective centers.
This award sponsored the 2012 Inter-Science of Learning Center Conference (iSLC) held at the University of California, San Diego, April 21-23, 2012. The iSLC conferences are held annually to promote the professional development of undergraduates, graduate students and post-doctoral researchers who are trainees of the six NSF-sponsored Science of Learning Centers (SLCs) in the US. These conferences have served as a vital resource for sharing research findings across the SLCs - the conferences have resulted in cross-center collaboration, including movement of trainees from one Center to another as they progress through their career. The conference allows trainees to share their center’s perspective, obtain invaluable experience presenting their work, and to meet potential cross-center collaborators. Senior investigators are not present during the majority of the conference, which gives trainees a low-pressure environment to interact with each other and form a scientific community. Beyond the professional development of trainees and fostering communication between SLCs, the conference had three additional goals: (1) to identify different ways each SLC can translate research on learning and technological development into helping people learn in schools, at home, and in the workplace, (2) to learn the concepts and scientific language used at each SLC, and (3) to continue the channels of communication and knowledge transfer that have been fostered by the previous SLC meetings. The intellectual merit of these activities resides in the interdisciplinary exchange of scientific information and ideas between the trainees of the SLCs. It has been shown that the most productive labs have researchers from multiple disciplines, and these conferences serve as a mechanism for trainees to learn about and pursue multiple approaches to their main research goals in the science of learning. The broader impacts of these activities are that future scientists in the science of learning develop collaborations with their peers, in the service of advancing the science of learning towards a science of educating.
