Program Announcement: Cognition and Student Learning CFDA 84.324A

Program Officer:
Dr. Celia Rosenquist
Celia.Rosenquist@ed.gov
(202) 219-2024

Purpose

The purpose of the Cognition and Student Learning in Special Education (Cognition) research program is to improve developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers with disabilities and learning for students with disabilities by bringing recent advances in cognitive science to (1) explore malleable factors¹ (e.g., instructional practices, children's skills) that are associated with better child outcomes for children with disabilities or children at risk for disabilities, as well as mediators or moderators of the relations between these factors and child outcomes, for the purpose of identifying potential targets of intervention; (2) develop innovative interventions — instructional approaches, practices, and curricula — to improve developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers with disabilities and for improving student learning for children with disabilities or at risk for disabilities; (3) establish the efficacy of existing interventions and approaches for improving student learning with efficacy or replication trials for infants and toddlers with disabilities and children with disabilities or at risk for disabilities; and (4) develop measurement tools that can be used to improve developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers with disabilities and student learning and achievement for children with disabilities or at risk for disabilities and that are intended for use by practitioners.

The long-term outcome of this program will be an array of tools and strategies (e.g., instructional approaches, computer tutors) that are based on principles of learning and information processing gained from cognitive science and that have been documented to be efficacious for improving developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers with disabilities and learning for students with disabilities or at risk for disabilities in preschool through Grade 12.

Background

The most important outcome of education is student learning. Recent advances in understanding learning have come from cognitive science, as well as cognitive and developmental psychology, but these advances have not been widely or systematically tapped in education in general, and in special education in particular. Through the Cognition research program, the Institute intends to establish a scientific foundation for learning and development in special education by building on the theoretical and empirical advances that have been gained through cognitive science and applying them to special education practice. The purpose of this research is to improve developmental outcomes for infants and toddlers with disabilities and learning and academic achievement for students with disabilities.

Cognitive science has shown explosive growth in the last 30 years. Basic laboratory research in cognitive science within disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, and neuroscience has generated new and important fundamental knowledge on how people learn. Cognitive scientists have identified a number of basic principles of learning that are supported by a solid research base (for examples, see Carver & Klahr, 2001). For the most part, however, these research principles have not been incorporated into education practice, either at the level of instruction or through the creation of materials that support teaching and learning. The types of projects that are appropriate for this program are illustrated by, but not limited to, the examples provided below.

Authentic education settings are often quite different from the laboratory. Contrasted with learning in laboratory settings, learning in everyday instructional settings typically involves content of greater complexity and scope, delivered over much longer periods of time, with much greater variability in delivery, and with far more distractions and competitors for student time and effort. Moreover, the parameters that have defined "learning" in laboratory experiments are often not the same as what defines learning in school. For example, in laboratory experiments, learning is typically defined as having occurred if individuals can recall an item a few minutes or hours after presentation; rarely are individuals asked to recall items days, weeks, or months after presentation. In school, however, students are expected to remember information presented in September the following May, and to be able to use that information in subsequent years. Students in school are expected to learn sets of related concepts and facts, and to build on that knowledge over time. Before some principles of learning generated from research in cognitive science can be applied to instruction in classroom settings, we need to understand if the principles generalize beyond well-controlled laboratory settings to the complex cognitive and social conditions of the classroom.

Under the Cognition program, the Institute will support research that utilizes cognitive science to develop, implement, and evaluate approaches that are intended to improve teaching and learning for children with high- or low-incidence disabilities. For example, a researcher might develop a set of guidelines for teachers on how to modify text characteristics (e.g., length of sentences, organization of text) intended to minimize working memory demands for science textbooks that will improve the ability of student's with reading disabilities to attend to and distinguish main ideas from extraneous details. As another illustration, a research team might adapt the display and presentation of visual materials in a math curriculum in ways that are intended to optimize visual attention and/or visuo-spatial processing in order to improve mathematics skills in elementary age students who are deaf and hard of hearing. As a final example, an applicant might propose to conduct an initial evaluation of whether an intervention intending to improve executive function skills enhances school readiness skills in preschoolers with intellectual disability.

The Institute also funds projects designed to explore the cognitive processes underlying the acquisition of developmental skills for infants and toddlers with disabilities, and communication, language, reading, writing, mathematics knowledge and skills, science knowledge and skills, or general study skills for children with disabilities or at risk for disabilities. This is translational research that is ultimately intended to inform the development of innovative intervention to improve outcomes for students with disabilities. Such studies might include short-term longitudinal studies in which the objective is to identify the component skills that are (a) highly correlated with child outcomes and (b) can be improved, accelerated, or advanced through intervention. In order for applications to be competitive, the researcher should make explicit the hypothesized link between the underlying cognitive process and improving developmental outcomes or academic achievement. That is, it is not sufficient to propose research to simply examine cognitive processes. The objective here is to gain a better understanding of which processes and skills are predictive of subsequent proficiency in developmental communication, language, reading, writing, mathematics, science, or study skills that would allow researchers to develop interventions (e.g., curricula or instructional approaches) that target these processes and ultimately result in improving developmental outcomes or academic achievement. For example, a researcher might propose to measure early narrative discourse skills or speech and language perception skills of students who are deaf or hard-of-hearing and correlate differences in the emergence of these skills with measures of reading skills such as phonological awareness, decoding, and knowledge of print concepts. Strong applications would include a rationale that justifies the plausibility of developing interventions that might improve the targeted underlying skills. The Institute strongly encourages cognitive scientists to collaborate with special education researchers who understand the variation in learner characteristics and teaching and learning in the context of authentic education settings.

Exploratory projects could also examine the underlying processes that explain learning problems (difficulties) that occur in authentic education settings. In these cases, researchers might begin by identifying a constellation of observed behaviors indicating a developmental or academic learning problem, and then propose a research plan to systematically explore possible causal explanations for that problem. For example, students with learning disabilities in mathematics may struggle with mastering their basic mathematics facts (e.g., addition, multiplication), and repeated practice does not appear to improve the students' mastery of these facts. For a Cognition Goal One project, the researchers could propose to explore whether the difficulty arises from conceptual and/or procedural mathematics knowledge. If the initial experiments indicate that students' difficulties arise due to procedural mathematics knowledge, the research team could further examine if deficiencies in the retrieval of procedural knowledge are explained by attentional mechanisms or phonological working memory. As with all Goal One proposals, strong applications would include a rationale that justifies the plausibility of developing interventions that might improve the targeted underlying skills.

References

Carver, S. M., & Klahr, D. (Eds.). (2001). Cognition and instruction: Twenty-five years of progress. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.