PETTT Spring Forum 2002:
How do we know that learning is taking place?

Thursday, May 30 2002 Walker Ames Room, Kane Hall Opening Remarks: Dr. Frederick Matsen, Chair, Department of Orthopaedics & Sports Medicine Keynote 1: Patricia Kuhl Director, Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning "The Infant Brain: How Do We Know What's Going On Up There?" Keynote 2: Sam Wineburg Professor, Educational Psychology, University of Washington "Knowing Other-Wise: How Learning the Past Teaches Us about Who We are in the Present"

Biographical sketches

Dr. Patricia K. Kuhl is the William P. and Ruth Gerberding University Professor at the University of Washington and the Co-Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Learning. Dr. Kuhl is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, is the President of the Acoustical Society of America, and received the Faculty Lectureship Award from the University of Washington.

Dr. Kuhl's research interests focus on the study of language and speech, particularly their development, and on how language information is processed by the brain.İHer research has played a major role in demonstrating how early exposure to language alters the mechanisms of perception, changing a person's abilities to hear certain distinctions in speech.İHer work also shows that the processing of language information occurs through multiple modalities, including vision and audition, both in early infancy and adulthood. The results of Dr. Kuhl's studies have illustrated how infants' early auditory experience plays a critical role in the acquisition of language in the first year of life.İThe work has broad implications, extending to psychology, ethology, and biology for its identification of critical periods in development; to linguistics and education for its applicability to bilingual education; to neuroscience for its implications for brain mapping of complex information; and to engineering for its implications concerning how computers might be programmed to respond to spoken language.

Dr. Kuhl is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Society, and the Acoustical Society of America. She has published several papers in the journal Science,İthe premier journal for experimental results that have important implications across a wide variety of disciplines. In 1990, she won the Distinguished Alumni Award from her undergraduate institution. In 1997, she was awarded the Silver Medal of the Acoustical Society of America. She is an honorary affiliate of the Neuroscience Research Group in La Jolla, CA run by Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman.İDr. Kuhl was one of six scientists invited to the White House to make a presentation at the President and Mrs. Clinton's Conference on "Early Learning and the Brain" in April of 1997. Her work has been widely covered by the press regarding implications for language processing in humans and by computers. In 1999, she co-authored The Scientist in the Crib: What Early Learning tells us about the Mind.

Professor Sam Wineburg teaches graduate courses in human learning and the history of educational psychology. He has won many awards including the University of Washington's Distinguished Teaching Award in 1991; a Spencer-National Academy of Education Post-doctoral fellowship; the Exemplary Research Award of the National Council for the Social Studies; and in January of 2002 Dr. Wineburg was presented the Frederic W. Ness Book Award for "the most important contribution to the improvement of the liberal arts" from the Association of American Colleges and Universities. He is on the editorial board of the American Educational Research Journal and a member of the Technical Assistance Group of the National Board of Professional Teaching Standards. His most recent work is funded by the James S. McDonnell Foundation Program in Cognitive Science and Education and the National Science Foundation.

Abstract of his talk: How does the past shape our sense of the present? How do our encounters with history shed light on the way humans process and store information? Drawing on over a decade of research into the thought processes of professional historians and high school students, experienced teachers and those starting out, this talk will explore how research in the learning sciences helps us understand how we come to know our past and our present. IT will explore how our sense of the past is shaped by formal education and the sweeping informal curriculum that we call culture.