The Learning Sciences Research Institute

The mission of the Learning Sciences Research Institute (LSRI) is to impact educational practice through research, development, and outreach.

The challenges in educational practice cross traditional disciplinary and professional boundaries, making them difficult to address. LSRI promotes collaborative and interdisciplinary activities that draw upon a wide range of knowledge and expertise relevant to these challenges.

Learning, Instruction & Teacher Development

LITD's research and development efforts are focused on understanding and improving how people learn as well as the contexts that support such learning. The Center supports multidisciplinary inquiry targeted at a deeper understanding of the reasons why some interactions, materials and instructional approaches enhance learning while others are less effective. The knowledge gained through such research informs efforts to design and evaluate new forms of instruction and assessment that can help children and adults learn. Too often this information remains within the research community. LITD is committed to pursuing avenues for making this knowledge available to the multiple audiences and stakeholders concerned with the education of our nation's populace.

Math & Science Education

The Institute for Mathematics and Science Education (IMSE) was established to promote UIC efforts to improve precollege and undergraduate education in the areas of mathematics and science. A hallmark of IMSE efforts is the collaboration of research mathematicians and scientists with education researchers and teachers. IMSE activities focus on four areas:

• Curriculum development
• Professional development and outreach efforts
• Faculty involvement in education improvement initiatives
• Research

IMSE serves as an intellectual center that brings together researchers and practitioners from various disciplines, providing a forum for discussion and collaboration. IMSE programs are characterized by a strong foundation in mathematics and science content.

Informative Assessment Initiative (IAI)

IAI is focused on developing a deeper understanding of skills-based educational assessments designed to directly support teachers and learners. Advanced psychometric methods are applied within multidisciplinary projects to improve informative assessment practice. Project opportunities being sought include:

• Informative assessment design: Conduct classroom studies to measure informative assessment effectiveness, design skills-level assessments, select skills sets that are aligned with curricula, standards and instruction.
• Validity Studies: Develop new approaches for gathering multiple sources of validity evidence, including cognitive, instructional, and measurement aspects of informative assessments, culminating in impacts on teaching and learning.
• Linkages among Curriculum, Instruction, and Assessment: Link informative assessments with classroom practice; develop methods and materials to help teachers make sound instructional use of informative testing.
• Foundational Psychometric Research: IAI is actively improving psychometric methods, including diagnostic modeling, student growth modeling, instructionally embedded assessments, assessment efficacy studies, skills-level reliability, validity, and model fit, computational speed and performance of software.

In developing the emerging engineering science of informative assessments, IAI is committed to forming active, working partnerships with schools, teacher preparation programs, university-based researchers, testing companies, and state and district departments of education to ensure that improved informative assessments methods are widely disseminated and used.