REU Site: The Temporal Dynamics of Learning

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The faculty and researchers in the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (UCSD) are engaged in REU Site with the overall aim of providing undergraduate students a research experience that leads to publishable work in a new interdisciplinary area studying the role of time and timing in learning, at multiple time and spatial scales, from the scale of synapses operating at the millisecond timescale up to the scale of teachers and students interacting over months. This project allows the team to give REU students access to all of the facilities and activities of the Center, including a state-of-the-art motion capture/brain dynamics facility, regular meetings of research networks composed of highly interdisciplinary and collaborative faculty, postdocs, graduate students and undergraduate researchers from more than seventeen institutions in the US, Canada, and Australia, and a yearly All Hands Meeting where they present their results. In addition to the training REU students receive in the individual laboratories, extensive professional development opportunities are provided through workshops, an undergraduate research conference, panel discussions, and GRE preparation courses.Intellectual MeritThe intellectual merit of this proposal is the advancement of a new science of the Temporal Dynamics of Learning through undergraduate research experiences in highly productive laboratories, and training in collaborative, rather than competitive, research. The research field is inherently interdisciplinary, combining cognitive science, psychology and computer science.Broader ImpactsA significant number of under-represented minorities are recruited from local community colleges (as it is a school-year program), resulting in the training of a diverse group of future scientists advancing the science of learning from multiple perspectives. The PI-team taps into established working relationships with these institutions in order to ensure an adequate applicant pool from the honors program, and use recommendations by their professors so that they can enroll the best students in the program.The site is co-funded by the Department of Defense in partnership with the NSF REU program.