What happened to the interdisciplinary study of learning in humans and machines?

ABSTRACT

When the Learning Sciences emerged in 1991, there was an ethos of studying learning in humans and machines in conjunction with one another. This ethos reflected three decades of prior work on the interdisciplinary study of learning; however, in the three decades since the emergence of the Learning Sciences, it seems to have largely disappeared. I begin by describing the ethos that was prevalent in 1991 using quotations from the inaugural editorial of the Journal of the Learning Sciences. I then describe how this ethos was prevalent decades before the Learning Sciences in four distinct approaches to cognitive science research, which I call the “Four C’s”—cognitivism, constructivism, cybernetics, and connectionism. I suggest three reasons why the Learning Sciences moved away from the use of artificial intelligence as a central tool for thinking about learning, noting that these reasons do not suggest a fundamental incompatibility between the two. I end by discussing how Learning Scientists might once again embrace artificial intelligence and computational modeling and use them as tools for gaining insight into the constructivist, situated, and socio-cultural nature of learning.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Yusuf Ahmad and Ahmed Zaidi with whom I had conversations that led to some of the ideas in this paper, including the notion of the Four C’s.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ In an earlier paper (Doroudi, 2022), I provided a much more detailed historical examination of how research on AI and education were intertwined throughout history; the conclusions of the present paper were largely a result of that historical investigation.