Education scholar wins grant for learning model

David Williamson Shaffer, an assistant professor of learning science, has won a $585,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to explore how professions can serve as models for student learning.

Shaffer’s research has produced a learning model that prods students to think in action, as professionals do.

Specifically, Shaffer will analyze learning environments in which students gain science, technology, engineering and mathematics skills by employing professional practices that are not usually part of conventional education programs.

The project will develop and study after-school programs in which eighth- and ninth-grade students use technology to solve problems.

For example, in Digital Zoo, students will learn physics, biomechanics and biology by designing virtual creatures using SodaConstructor, an Internet construction game. In a second program, called Ecology 2020, they will learn ecology by working as urban planners trying to develop plans for sustainable urban growth by using geographic information systems.

“One of the things technology does is give kids access to the way decisions are made in the real world,” says Shaffer.

The research could be a gateway to improving after-school programs and, ultimately, to restructuring an education system whose roots are in the industrial revolution. Rather than viewing education through the prism of a conventional curriculum, for instance, such research could lead to teaching students to think as doctors, architects and journalists.

“Professionals have different ways of looking at the world, and ways of thinking are just as coherent as disciplines are,” Shaffer says. “It’s important to have kids who know about math and science. But it’s also important for them to understand how doctors think, so they can make better medical decisions or how lawyers think to understand how laws are made.”

The five-year grant is made possible by the Faculty Early Career Development Program, which offers the foundation’s most prestigious awards for junior faculty members. The program supports the early-career development activities of scholars most likely to become the academic leaders of the 21st century.