ISLS 2021 Pre-Conference Tutorial: Aggregating Learning Sciences Knowledge Through Collaboratories

June 1st and 2nd, 2021 - 7:00am - 9:00am PT

Title
Aggregating Learning Sciences Knowledge Through Collaboratories

Organizers
Britte Haugan Cheng, MenloEDU
Tiffany Clark, MenloEDU
Ann Edwards, WestEd
Timothy Podkul, SRI International

Registration Closed

Intended audience

The audience of this tutorial are those who wish to understand the benefits and challenges of working on crossproject collaboratories. Collaboratories are intended to accelerate the creation and sharing of empirically-derived knowledge about implementation and practice that is usually derived on a project by project or implementation context by context basis. This includes:

• Researchers involved in design-based and implementation research who specifically study implementation contexts and wish to aggregate knowledge with those studying similar classroom practices or tools.

• Researchers who are studying conditions for scaling practices or tools who also need to systematically study contexts of implementation.

• Researchers engaged in researcher-practitioner partnerships (RPPs) who wish to share, compare and aggregate knowledge being developed would also be ideal participants in the sessions.

• Researchers interested in this mode of work from a theoretical perspective.

Theme and Goals

The theme of the tutorial will be that collaboratories offer an innovative structure to support learning sciences challenges: better understanding of how implementation contexts and designs of tools and practices interact, how to share this design knowledge, how to aggregate insights from RPPs, and how to use this knowledge to support scaling of tools and practices. The goals of the event are to a) frame these challenges, b) describe how working a cross-project collaboratory structure can be a productive means to addressing these challenges, c) discuss examples of prior collaboratories including how prior collaboratories were structured, what common tools and theories helped the collaboratory participants successfully aggregate insights from individual research efforts, etc., d) discuss challenges of prior collaboratory efforts, e) discuss what other research challenges might be suited to a collaboratory mode and f) provide a space for participants to discuss with presenters their own ideas for possible collaboratory work.