Multidisciplinary Cooperation in Education: The Munich Center of the Learning Sciences

Abstract

The basic purpose of teaching and research in educational science is to develop, organize and disseminate knowledge that illuminates the understanding of society and its subsystems, especially the educational system, and nurtures its continuous improvement by providing supporting evidence either for the decision-making processes in individual and organizational learning activities or for social and educational practice. The thematic focus of the Munich Center of the Learning Sciences (MCLS) is on the conditions, processes and outcomes of learning. Learning is considered a lifelong activity by which individuals adapt to dynamically changing environments, enabling humans to transfer cultural achievements across generations. Formerly, different academic disciplines tended to investigate aspects of learning in isolation. Yet, highly relevant processes and systemic problems (for example, dropout rates in educational systems) can be addressed adequately only in interdisciplinary collaborations. The MCLS brings together researchers from educational science, psychology, neuroscience, economics, sociology, biology, mathematics, medicine and computer science who share methodologically an empirical orientation, from brain imaging and the mathematical modelling methods of cognitive neuroscience, observation methods of cognition and social behaviour research, and formative and summative evaluation methods, to representative surveys in education and adult learning. Of course, the different disciplines still exist and are further developed. What is new is the systematic networking and intensive cooperation between the disciplines on the cross-sectional topic of learning.