ABSTRACT
Over the past 25 years, the interdisciplinary field of learning sciences has emerged as an important nexus of research on how people learn, what might be important for them to learn and why, how we might create contexts in which such learning can occur, and how we can determine what learning has occurred and for whom. At the same time this emergence has prompted repeated attempts to probe and elucidate how learning sciences is similar to, as well as differentiated from, long-established disciplinary research areas, such as anthropology, cognitive psychology, cognitive sciences, curriculum and instruction, educational psychology, and sociology. This is a difficult question to answer, in part because the learning sciences builds on the knowledge base of many of these disciplinary research areas while at the same time taking a “use oriented” perspective on the knowledge base. That is, much as Stokes (1997) distinguished between basic research and research oriented toward solving practical problems, (i.e., research in Pasteur’s quadrant), research in the learning sciences is often situated in problems of practice that occur in a range of “learning” contexts, including formal or informal settings dedicated to schooling, workplace, or leisure/entertainment goals.
