Professor Studies STEM Learning

Associate Professor Reed Stevens, delivered a colloquium for department faculty, students, and guests on February 2, 2009, entitled "Rethinking & Renewing STEM Learning by Following it In & Out of School."

Dr. Stevens is Associate Professor of Educational Psychology/Curriculum and Instruction at the University of Washington in Seattle. For over a decade and a half his research agenda has followed STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) thinking and learning across school and out-of-school settings. The settings for this research have included professional STEM workplaces, STEM activities in schools at different grade levels (from childcare centers to undergraduate education), interactive science centers, and homes.

During his presentation, Dr. Stevens recounted the development of this program of work, beginning with earlier studies that compared the interactional and organizational conditions of STEM learning in and out of school and explaining how his work moved toward an approach that involves direct following of the same people over time and across their learning experiences in different settings.

The underlying theoretical rationale for Dr. Stevens' work is based on the view that to understand how people become capable and creative participants in STEM related practices—whether in school, everyday life, or work—we need to follow their learning pathways, which don’t stop at the classroom door. He argued that this program of work (a) casts important questions in the expanding field of “the learning sciences” in a new light and points in new theoretical directions for how we understand learning and (b) offers new directions for STEM educational practice, from policy, to teaching, to the design of new learning technologies.