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Committee on Science Learning, Kindergarten through Eighth Grade

Richard Duschl, (Chair) Professor Science Education Rutgers Graduate School of Education		Daniel Levin Science Teacher Montgomery Blair High School
Charles Anderson Professor Department of Teacher Education Michigan State University		Kathleen Metz Associate Professor Cognition and Development Graduate School of Education University of California, Berkeley
Tom Corcoran Co-Director - Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE), Executive Director - Learning Partnership University of Pennsylvania		Helen Quinn Professor of Physics, Education and Public Outreach Manager - Stanford Linear Accelerator Center Stanford University
Kevin Crowley Associate Professor - Cognitive Psychology, Research Scientist - Learning Research & Development Center University of Pittsburgh		Brian Reiser Professor Learning Sciences School of Education and Social Policy Northwestern University
Frank Keil Professor Psychology and Linguistics Yale University		Deborah Roberts K-8 Science Specialist Maryland State Department of Education
David Klahr Professor Carnegie Mellon University		Leona Schauble Professor Education Vanderbilt University
Okhee Lee Professor Department of Teaching and Learning Miami University		Carol Smith Associate Professor Psychology University of Massachusetts, Boston

Richard Duschl, (Chair) is a Professor of Science Education at Rutgers University. Prior to joining the Rutgers faculty, he held the chair of Science Education at King's College London, and prior to that was Professor of Science Education at Vanderbilt University. One focus of his research examines how the history and philosophy of science can be applied to science education. The research agenda is to better understand the social and cognitive dynamics for making science classrooms inquiry and epistemic communities. Scientific inquiry, then, is seen as fundamentally focusing on the evidence and the argumentation discourse processes that lead to scientific decisions. A second focus of his research is the design of instructional sequences that promote assessment for learning. With NSF support from several grants, this research has led to many new ideas about how formative assessment strategies can help learners and teachers make scientific thinking visible. He also has expertise in informal science education and in earth science education. Respected among scholars in science education and learning domains, Duschl publishes widely in U.S. and international journals on inquiry, science teaching, learning, cognition, and assessment.  Dr. Duschl has served as editor of Science Education and was a member of the NRC committee that wrote the Inquiry Addendum for the National Science Education Standards. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland at College Park.

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Charles W. (Andy) Anderson is Professor in the Department of Teacher Education, Michigan State University. Anderson’s primary research interests are in using conceptual change and sociocultural research on student learning to improve classroom science teaching. He has published numerous articles and book chapters on this and related issues, as well as developing science teaching materials that are based on research on student learning. Anderson was co-author of Matter and Molecules, Project 2061’s top-rated middle school science teaching materials. Anderson served as lead consultant to the State of Michigan for the development of Michigan’s state science objectives. He also led the development of the life science component of the Michigan Educational Assessment Program. He is past president of the National Association for Research in Science Teaching. He has been co-editor of the Journal of Research in Science Teaching and associate editor of Cognition and Instruction, and currently serves on the editorial board of the American Educational Research Journal. He recently served as design team member for the NRC’s Committee on Test Design for K-12 Science Achievement. Anderson received his Ph.D. in science education from The University of Texas at Austin.

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Tom Corcoran co-directs the Consortium for Policy Research in Education (CPRE) at the University of Pennsylvania where he has led evaluations of the Merck Institute for Science Education, the Annenberg Challenge in Philadelphia, team-based schooling in Cincinnati, and the America's Choice Comprehensive School Design. Prior to joining CPRE, he served as the Policy Advisor for Education for New Jersey Governor Jim Florio, Director of School Improvement for Research for Better Schools, and Director of Evaluation and Chief-of-Staff of the New Jersey Department of Education. He is a member of the MacArthur Foundation's Network on Teaching and Learning and a member of the Research Committee of the International Baccalaureate Organization. He teaches a course on education policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University. Mr. Corcoran’s major research interests are the use of evidence to inform policy and practice in public education, policies for expanding access to challenging curriculum, the development and use of clinical expertise about teaching, the efficacy of different approaches to professional development, and the impact of changes in work environments on the productivity of teachers and students. He received a Masters in Education (M.Ed.) from the University of London in 1963.

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Kevin Crowley is Associate Professor of Education and Cognitive Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh’s Learning Research & Development Center where he also directs the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Settings. Dr. Crowley’s research interests focus on the development of children's scientific thinking in informal, formal, and everyday settings. His work focuses on understanding how children develop knowledge and skill in the context of family scientific thinking in context such as museums or on the web. He focuses on the question of how to best coordinate children’s experience in science across development and across different parts of the formal and informal educational infrastructure. He was a visiting fellow at the Department of Psychology and Education at Nagoya University in Japan. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from Carnegie Mellon University in 1994.

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Frank Keil is Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at Yale University and Master of Morse College.. Previously, he held the William R. Kenan, Jr. endowed chair in psychology at Cornell University. His research focuses on how people come to make sense of the world around them. Much of this research involves asking how intuitive explanations and understandings emerge in development and how they are related to notions of cause, mechanism and agency. These relations are linked to broader questions of what concepts are, how they change with development and increasing expertise, and how they are structured in adults. His work also explores how children and adults learn to navigate the division of cognitive labor that integrates both formal and informal scientific understanding.  Dr. Keil received the NIH multi-year MERIT award in 2003 which provides long-term support for outstanding investigators. He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. He received his PhD in psychology, with an emphasis in Developmental, from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977.

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David Klahr is a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University where he served as Department head from 1983 to 1993, and is currently Director of an IES-funded interdisciplinary Training Grant in Educational Research . He received a Ph.D. in organizations and social behavior from Carnegie Mellon University in 1968, and taught at the University of Chicago, University of Stirling (Scotland), and the London School of Business before returning to CMU.  His early work addressed cognitive processes in such diverse areas as multidimensional scaling, voting behavior, college admissions, consumer choice, peer review and problem solving. Dr. Klahr pioneered the application of information-processing analysis to questions of cognitive development, and formulated the first computational models to account for children's thinking processes. His current research focuses on cognitive development, scientific reasoning, and cognitively-based instructional interventions in early science education. He served on the NRC Committee on Research in Education and the Committee on Foundations of Educational Assessment. The latter resulted in the report Knowing What Students Know (NRC, 2001). He is currently on the govening board of the Cognitive Development Society, and an Associate Editor for Developmental Psychology

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Okhee Lee is Professor in the School of Education, University of Miami, Florida. Her research areas include science education, language and culture, and teacher education. She was awarded a 1993-95 National Academy of Education Spencer Post-doctoral Fellowship. She was a 1996-97 fellow at the National Institute for Science Education, Wisconsin Center for Education Research, University of Wisconsin-Madison. She has directed research and teacher training projects funded by the National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Education, Spencer Foundation, and the Florida Department of Education. One of her current research projects implements instructional interventions to promote science learning and  English language and literacy development   for elementary students from diverse languages and cultures. She serves on editorial boards for major education research journals as well as advisory boards for science education reform projects. Her research has appeared in the American Educational Research Journal, Educational Researcher, Review of Educational Research,  Review of Research in Education, Journal of Research in Science Teaching, Science Education, Teaching and Teacher Education, and Handbook of  research on teacher education (1996, 2nd ed.).  Lee currently serves as member of the National Research Council’s Board on Science Education.  Lee received her Ph.D. in 1989 in educational psychology from Michigan State University. 

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Daniel Levin is a science teacher at Blair High School in Maryland, an ethnically diverse school in the DC area. He taught middle school science for a number of years and is now a high school biology and chemistry teacher. He is currently on leave from the school and is acting as a professional development school coordinator for the University of Maryland while he pursues his Ph.D. in science education. Mr. Levin has also held positions as a research biologist at the National Institutes of Health and at Harvard University. He is co-author on reports of this research published in the journal Genetics and the Journal of Biological Chemistry. He has undertaken a number of professional activities in science education including serving as research assistant in the Cognition and Technology Laboratory at the University of Maryland, writing curricula in biology, and participating in a summer institute for teachers at the National Institutes of Diabetes, Digestive, and Kidney Research. He received his bachelor of arts in biology and anthropology from Brandeis University, a master of arts in teaching from Towson State University, and is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in science education with Dr. David Hammer at the University of Maryland.

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Kathleen Metz is Associate Professor of Cognition and Development at the Graduate School of Education, University of California, Berkeley. Her research interests center on children's scientific cognition, where developmental and instructional perspectives intersect.  She is also interested in children's intuitions about rudimentary statistical constructs that are involved in data-based inquiry. At the post-doctoral level, she studied cognitive development with Jean Piaget's successor, Bärbel Inhelder, at the University of Geneva, Switzerland; and she was an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow in Cognitive Science, working with Herbert Simon at Carnegie Mellon.  Her career spans work as a classroom teacher, curriculum developer, teacher educator, and cognitive science researcher. She serves on the advisory board for the National Sciences Resources Center. She received her Ed.D. from the University of Massachusetts in Human Development and Teacher Education. Dr. Metz served on the planning committee for the CFE workshop on Mathematical and Scientific Development in Early Childhood which was co-sponsored by BOSE and MSEB.

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Helen Quinn is Professor of Physics at Stanford University where she also serves as Education Outreach Manager at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. Quinn is a theoretical physicist who was inducted into the National Academies in 2003. She currently serves as the president of the American Physical Society (calender year 2004). In addition to her scholarship in physics Quinn is interested in science education and the continuing education of science teachers. She was an active contributor to the California State Science Standards development proccess. She is past president of the non-profit Contemporary Physics Education Project. Previously she served as a member on the NRC's Committee on Physics of the Universe, and on the Federal Coordinating Committee on Science, Mathematics and Technology Education. Quinn received a Ph.D. in physics from Stanford University in 1967.

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Brian Reiser is Professor of Learning Sciences at Northwestern University’s School of Education and Social Policy. Dr. Reiser’s research concerns the design and study of investigation environments and inquiry support tools for science. The goal of this work, conducted in urban middle and high school classrooms, is to develop a model of "reflective inquiry" and the pedagogical principles for its support. These projects explore the design of computer based learning environments that scaffold investigation and scientific argumentation about biological phenomena and the design of inquiry support tools that help students organize, reflect on, and communicate about the progress of their investigations. This work is being conducted as part of the initiatives of the NSF Center for Learning Technologies in Urban Schools (LeTUS), which is working to understand how to make learning technologies a pervasive part of science classrooms in urban schools. Dr. Reiser is also a member of the core faculty for the Center for Curriculum Materials in Science, a collaboration of Project 2061, Michigan State, Northwestern, and the University of Michigan. Dr. Reiser serves on the editorial boards of Interactive Learning Environments and Journal of the Learning Sciences. He recently served as design team member for the NRC’s Committee on Test Design for K-12 Science Achievement. He received his Ph.D. in psychology in 1983 from Yale University.

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Deborah Roberts is an experienced teacher of elementary and middle grades science who currently serves as Science Instructional Specialist with the Montgomery County Public Schools. Until 2004, Ms. Roberts taught science and mathematics grades 1 through 8 for many years. In 2001 Ms. Roberts was named Carnegie Academy for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning K-12 scholar. Throughout her career as a classroom teacher, Ms. Roberts has also been active in educational research. She has presented research on teaching at the American Educational Research Association, National Association for Research in Science Teaching, the National Science Teachers Association, and other national and regional science teaching and research venues. Her current position entails writing and developing curriculum with classroom teachers, training teachers in inquiry science teaching methods, and supervising elementary science instruction across the district. Ms. Roberts also teaches preservice courses in science curriculum and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in science education.

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Leona Schauble is Professor of Education at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include the relations between everyday reasoning and more formal, culturally supported, and schooled forms of thinking, such as scientific and mathematical reasoning. Her research focuses on such topics as belief change in contexts of scientific experimentation, everyday reasoning, causal inference, and the origins and development of model-based reasoning. Prior to her work at Vanderbilt, she worked at the University of Wisconsin, the Learning Research and Development Center at the University of Pittsburgh, and the Children’s Television Workshop in New York. Schauble received a Ph.D. in developmental and educational psychology from Columbia University in 1983. Schauble recently served as a member of the Strategic Educational Research Partnership, an NRC-affiliated venture designed to construct a powerful knowledge base, derived from both research and practice that will support the efforts of school people at all levels with the ultimate goal of significantly improving student learning.

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Carol L. Smith is associate professor of psychology at The University of Massachusetts- Boston. She is interested in understanding how concepts develop and change, both in children and scientists, and why some science concepts are very hard for students to understand. This research focuses on characterizing students’ initial commonsense theories in some domains (which often contain concepts that are incommensurable with the scientists’ concepts) and understanding the processes by which students can restructure and change these concepts. Her research has examined the role of several practices in facilitating conceptual change in schooling contexts, and how different schooling contexts affect students’ general conceptions of the nature of science, learning, and knowledge. Dr. Smith recently served as a design team member for the NRC’s Committee on Test Design for K-12 Science Achievement. Dr. Smith received her Ph.D. in Personality and Developmental Studies in 1976 from Harvard University.

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