The Institute for Learning

LAUREN B. RESNICK

Lauren Resnick is an internationally known scholar in the cognitive science of learning and instruction. Her recent research has focused on school reform, assessment, effort-based education, the nature and development of thinking abilities, the development of literacy and the relation between school learning and everyday competence. Her current work lies at the intersection of cognitive science and policy for education. Dr. Resnick is editor of Research Points, a policy brief published by the American Educational Research Association. The publication connects research to education policy and helps ensure that decision-makers have accessible, sound and important research on timely education topics.

Dr. Resnick is co-founder and co-director of the New Standards Project, which has developed standards and assessments that have widely influenced state and school district practice. She also founded and directs the Institute for Learning, which is assisting several major urban school districts in their efforts to raise academic achievement across the spectrum of students now attending our schools. Resnick was a member of the national Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce and served as chair of the assessment committee of the SCANS Commission and of the Resource Group on Student Achievement of the National Education Goals Panel. She was advisor to the first chairman of the National Education Goals Panel and served as a member of the National Council on Education Standards and Testing, the governing body that launched the nation's standards policy. She has served on the Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education and on the Mathematical Sciences Education Board at the National Research Council and several additional NRC panels and committees. Her National Academy of Sciences monograph, Education and Learning to Think, has been influential in school reform efforts, and her widely circulated Presidential Address to the American Educational Research Association, "Learning In School and Out," has shaped thinking about youth apprenticeship and school-to-work transition.

Dr. Resnick is Professor of Psychology at the University of Pittsburgh, where she directs the prestigious Learning Research and Development Center. Educated at Radcliffe and Harvard, she has been an Overseer of Harvard University and a member of the Smithsonian Council. She has received several awards in recognition of her work, including the 1998 E. L. Thorndike Award from the American Psychological Association and the 1999 Oeuvre Award from the European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction.