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Educational Psychology

Leslie Rupert Herrenkohl

Associate Professor, Educational Psychology

312E Miller Hall - Phone 616-6306

leslieh@u.washington.edu

Education Publications Courses Curriculum Vitae

My research program focuses on applying developmental theory to support the design of learning environments. I am interested in learning that takes place in informal settings such as museums and homes as well as formal school settings. The driving question of my work is: What contributes to powerful learning experiences for children? I have three primary strands of scholarship. They include: (1) Investigating children’s conceptual and epistemological understanding in science; (2) Studying collaboration, including my own collaboration with educational practitioners; and (3) Creating and investigating holistic models of learning that address the intellectual, social, and affective dimensions of learning together.

Currently I am involved in several research projects related to each of these strands of scholarship. The first project is the Learning Inquiry through Reflective Assessment (LIRA) Project (http://depts.washington.edu/liransf/index.html). The LIRA Project is a NSF supported collaborative project with Dr. John Frederiksen (PI) and Dr. Min Li from the UW, and Dr. Barbara White of UC Berkeley. This project provides a web-based platform to support student inquiry in science. The platform includes formative assessments to support on-going student self-reflection throughout the inquiry process. The goal of the project is to demonstrate that this formative approach to instruction and assessment can be combined with formal scoring of final inquiry projects for school accountability purposes. Assessing inquiry skills, although deemed highly important for science learning, has proven to be challenging for educators and test designers. This project provides one way to address this need.

I am also involved in the Learning in Informal and Formal Environments (LIFE) Center (http://life-slc.org/). This NSF supported Science of Learning Center involves many projects focused on better understanding learning across the lifespan in formal and informal settings. I study collaboration through the LIFE Center with colleagues Brigid Barron, Na’ilah Nasir, and Roy Pea at Stanford University and a group of fabulous UW and Stanford graduate students. Our work combines data collection across multiple populations and contexts including professional musicians, education graduate students, pre-service teachers, high school mathematics students and teachers, and middle school students involved in an on-line technology project. Our project seeks to better understand collaboration and collaborative capacities to inform the research knowledge base and to contribute to designing learning environments that support more effective collaboration.

My final area of scholarship currently involves writing a book with graduate student Veronique Mertl for Cambridge University Press. The book focuses on work I started through a National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship. It is tentatively titled How Students Come to Be and to Know: A Case for a Broad View of Learning. In this book we argue for a perspective on learning that goes beyond mastering knowledge and academic content. We argue that to talk about students’ learning in terms of knowledge alone diminishes and dismisses some profound and complex human experiences. Persistence in the face of difficulty, yielding the floor, actively listening to ideas, accepting and responding to feedback, and challenging ideas in constructive ways are also crucial dimensions of students’ experiences. Our contention is that as students become knowledgeable in new areas of study, they are also becoming certain kinds of participants in relation to that subject matter, to one another, and to teachers, parents, and the larger community. Our book makes an argument for a view of human learning that engages the “affective-volitional processes” (Vygotsky, 1987/1934) of becoming students alongside and in conjunction with processes of knowing. We provide examples of fourth graders studying science as a way to illustrate how this model contributes to a more complete and complex understanding of learning in school settings.

Education

Ph.D., Clark University, 1995

Selected Publications

Herrenkohl, L.R. (2006). Intellectual Role-Taking: An Approach to Support Discussion in Heterogeneous Elementary Science Classes. Theory into Practice., 45, 47-54.

Stevens, R., Wineburg, S., Herrenkohl, L.R., and Bell, P. (2005). The comparative understanding of school subjects: Past, present, and future. Review of Educational Research, 75(2), 125-157.

Cornelius, L. and Herrenkohl, L.R. (2004). Power in the Classroom: How the Classroom Environment Shapes Students’ Relationships with Each Other and with Concepts. Cognition and Instruction, 22, 467-498.

Kawasaki, K., Herrenkohl, L.R., and Yeary, S. (2004). Theory Building and Modeling in a Sinking and Floating Unit: A Case Study of Third and Fourth Grade Students’ Developing Epistemologies of Science. International Journal of Science Education, 26, 1-26.

Palincsar, A. S., & Herrenkohl, L. R. (2002). Designing collaborative contexts. Theory Into Practice, 41, 26-32.

Herrenkohl, L.R., Palincsar, A.S., DeWater, L.S., and Kawasaki, K. (1999). Developing scientific communities in classrooms: A sociocognitive approach. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 8, 451-493.

Herrenkohl, L. R., & Wertsch, J. V. (1999). The use of cultural tools: Mastery and appropriation. In I. Sigel (Ed.), Development of mental representation: Theories and applications. (pp. 415-435). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.

Herrenkohl, L. R., & Guerra, M. R. (1998). Participant structures, scientific discourse, and student engagement in fourth grade, Cognition and Instruction, 16, 433-475.

Reddy, M., Jacobs, P., McCrohon, C. & Herrenkohl, L.R. (1998). Creating scientific communities in the elementary school: Perspectives from a teacher-researcher collaboration. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann.

For a full listing of Dr. Herrenkohl’s publications, please see her CV.

Recent syllabi for classes that I teach (all in pdf format):