ISLS 2023: Building Knowledge and Sustaining Our Community: ISLS Doctoral Consortium and Early Career Workshops

The United States has historically been a global leader in the field of the learning sciences, an interdisciplinary field that draws on multiple theoretical and methodological perspectives with the goal of advancing knowledge about human learning and development in a variety of educational settings, frequently in the context of emerging technologies. The preeminent conference in this field is the Annual Meeting of the International Society of the Learning Sciences (ISLS). At this conference the latest research is presented and practitioners learn the state of the art techniques in learning science research, and the related research area of computer-supported collaborative learning. The project provides partial travel support to the ISLS Meeting for six Ph.D. students from the United States, selected through a competitive process, to present their work and receive additional mentoring outside of their dissertation committees as part of a doctoral consortium. The project also supports partial travel support for five early career researchers from the United States, to discuss their research programs and career trajectories with peers and senior researchers in the field. The intellectual merit of the work is in improving the dissertation research of the graduate students and building impact and opportunity for early career researchers; in both tracks the work is enhanced by guidance from world-class mentors who meet with the students in a structured format to improve their research. The broader impact includes multiplying opportunities to develop collaborations in the field of learning sciences, and supporting the career development of some of the best and brightest researchers in multiple disciplines who work in this interdisciplinary area. By supporting a pipeline of high-quality US scholars from multiple disciplines into this interdisciplinary field, this proposal helps ensure US participation and parity in this productive and vital area of research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.