SLRC: Science of Learning Research Centre (SR120300015)

In this innovative centre, researchers in education, neuroscience and cognitive psychology worked together with teachers to understand the learning process. This collaboration was designed to establish new criteria to assess the impact of different types of learning and strategies to inform teaching practices of benefit to all Australians.

Team members: Ottmar Lipp, John Hattie, Michael Timms, Pankaj Sah, and others including Russell Tytler, 2013-2017

At Deakin, the research centred on a collaboration with Professor David Clarke from the University of Melbourne to investigate collaborative reasoning through multimodal representation construction. The research involved video capture of groups of students in the specially designed ‘science of learning’ classroom with multiple zoom and track cameras to monitor student actions and talk across the class. Topics included representation construction in learning science, teacher noticing in science and maths, offline coding, modeling in science, and art-science interdisciplinarity, and science/ mathematical modeling.

The Deakin team working with this facility included: Russell Tytler, Joseph Ferguson, Peta White, Wanty Widjaja, George Aranda, Peter Hubber, Vaughan Prain, Radhika Gorur, Lihua Xu, Wendy Jobling with academics from the Universities of Melbourne, and Wollongong.

Sample publications

Ferguson, J., Aranda, G., Tytler, R., & Gorur, R. (2019). Video research – Purposeful selection from rich data sets in Xu, L., Aranda, G., & Clarke, D. (Eds.) Video-based research in education – Cross-disciplinary perspectives, (pp. 124-139). Oxon, UK: Routledge.

Tytler, R. (2016). Drawing to learn in STEM. Proceedings of the ACER Research Conference: Improving STEM learning: What will it take? (pp. 45-50). Camberwell: Australian Council for Educational Research. http://research.acer.edu.au/research_conference/RC2016/

Xu, L., Widjaja, W., & Ferguson, J. P. (2018). Seeing through the eyes of the teacher? Investigating primary school teachers’ professional noticing through a video-based research methodology. International Journal of Research and Method in Education. doi:10.1080/1743727X.2018.1499016.

Aranda G., & Ferguson, J. (2018). Unplugged programming; The future of teaching computational thinking. Pedagogika, 68(3), 279-292.