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Area of Expertise Development of spatial skills in children and adults, and how to facilitate skill development. Sex differences and other individual differences in higher level cognitive skills. Teaching cognitive science theories to educators. What are the findings or theories from your area of expertise that we could apply to higher education? Major concern is that there is a body of knowledge on such topics as analogical transfer, reading, and other issues concerning how people learn, that needs to be communicated to prospective teachers. Education majors need to have courses in cognitive science in the same way that engineering majors need physics and premed majors need biology. What are the (most important) unsolved problems? What should be included in an agenda for research? The major unsolved problem is a political one. There is a real need to convince colleges of education and also school districts that the knowledge provided by cognitive science is important for educators to have and to continually be trained in. How do we sell the achievements of cognitive science to those that could benefit from it, namely educators? In looking at an agenda for research, we would want to look at the leverage points for achieving the transfer and wide scale acceptance of knowledge about cognitive science to educators. There is a need to fund demonstration projects that can exploit these leverage points and to evaluate their effectiveness. It should be a funding priority to have people explore technology transfer in cognitive science. What prototypes can you point us toward where principles from the science of learning are already being applied (e.g., activities, courses, fields of study, degree programs, or entire systems)? John Bransford and Marilyn Adams are good examples of people that have worked very effectively in developing cognitive science applications and actively interfacing with school districts. However, the work that they are doing is specific to types of problems and to age groups. So I would say that there are not any prototypes for the broad intertwining of cognitive science with colleges of education and schools in the way that I am suggesting. What are the major problems with or barriers to redesigning higher education? There are institutional barriers that are created by the current structuring of academic departments. Colleges of education do not traditionally employ cognitive scientists. The people who would need to teach the courses that I am envisioning would need to come from different departments and this creates turf issues Do you have any ideas for overcoming them? Nothing is as powerful in overcoming barriers as financial incentives. That is why there is a real need for funding demonstration projects that can illustrate the effectiveness of this type of training. Financial incentives to get colleges of education to work with cognitive psychology departments would be very helpful. What do we need to do so that one outcome of the retreat is to effect change (in ways that we want)? It is typically the case that people will have personally rewarding and illuminating experiences at the conference or retreat and come up with interesting recommendations. However, as the outcomes are turned into a report written to the funding agency there is often no further monitoring or follow up. I think that it is important to see what could be done with Spencer Foundation and other funding agencies in terms of further monitoring and exchange after the writing of the report. It would be helpful to set up a format in which there was a meeting with Diane and others along with the funding agencies to create an exchange about the ideas that were generated. The follow up with funding agencies is key and it would be very beneficial to continue to develop funding contacts with other agencies so that the ideas generated by the retreat could be pursued.
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