Learning Sciences

Complex Systems Research focuses on systems comprising sets of agents that form unified wholes in their interactions, relationships, or dependencies. Their emergent, global behaviors cannot be predicted on the basis of the rules governing the individual agents. Definitions and descriptions of complex systems revolve around such terms as emergent, adaptive, nonlinear, irreducible, noncompressible, non-decomposable, multi-level, self-organizing, context-sensitive, and adaptive.

Coherence Discourses regard distinctions and descriptions as useful devices to make sense of the complex dynamics of learning, but they caution that such devices are mere heuristic conveniences. Coherence Discourses suggest that truths do not exist independently or outside of a system – which is a commentary on humans’ understanding of reality, not a commentary on reality. Most Coherence Discourses employ biological and ecological metaphors, with dynamics framed in evolutionary terms.

Cognitive Science is the study of cognition in humans, non-human animals, and machines. It brings together psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, and other domains. Typically, the foci of Cognitive Science are identified as learning, development, perception, attention, reasoning, emotion, consciousness, memory, language, creativity, and intelligence, and its are identified as better understanding the mind, advancing practical knowledge of learning, and developing intelligent devices.

Design Thinking is about the cognitive, strategic, and practical processes associated with designing solutions and/or products. Design Thinking is considered a process for innovation and includes problem seeking and identification, imagining solutions or products, planning, creating, prototyping, testing, and improving, as it spans solution-based strategies for solving ill-defined problems across human-made and natural contexts.