Kevin Crowley

Kevin Crowley
School of Education
University of Pittsburgh
727 Learning Research and Development Center
Pittsburgh, PA 15260
PHONE: 412-624-8116
EMAIL: crowleyk@pitt.edu

Full Time Faculty - Associate Professor

I am director the University of Pittsburgh Center for Learning in Out-of-School Environments (UPCLOSE) and an associate professor of education and psychology. For my most recent info, visit the UPCLOSE web site: http://upclose.lrdc.pitt.edu

UPCLOSE is a project of the Learning Research and Development Center and School of Education. UPCLOSE conceptualizes, develops, and studies informal learning experiences. Our work explores what it means to learn and change as a result of activity in everyday environments including museums, commercial and community settings, on the web, and at home.

We connect academic theory and real world practice. Our research focuses on relationships between learners, mediators, environments, and experiences.

We are a place for graduate students to pursue Ph.D.'s in the area of informal learning. Graduate students in UPCLOSE are admitted through the Cognitive Studies program or the Cognitive Psychology program. We are a place for post-doctoral research associates to extend their training to connect their Ph.D. degrees with informal learning research. We are also a place for undergraduate students to get involved in research projects, to gain experience in informal learning environments, or to conduct senior thesis projects focusing on informal learning.

The students and staff at UPCLOSE work primarily through partnering with informal learning organizations to develop and use new models of learning in out-of-school settings. Our work often initially connects with our partners through their need for evaluation research, but it rarely ends with simple evaluation. We are most interested in work that pushes on current understandings of what it means to learn and change as a result of informal educational experiences.

Explicit in our approach to partnerships is the design experiment philosophy. We believe that new theories of learning are best developed, revised, and used when they are embedded deeply in the design of novel learning environments. This comes about as a result of interdisicplinary collaboration between researchers, designers, educators, content specialists, and the learners themselves.

Among our current partners are the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh, where we have a full time learning lab, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the Warhol Museum, CMU's School of Design, CMU's Robotics Institute, and the Arts Education Collaborative.

School Affiliations

Department: Instruction and Learning
Department: Learning Policy Center
Program: Cognitive Studies
Program: Learning Sciences and Policy

Education

Postdoctoral Fellow, Developmental Psychology, University of California, 1997
Ph.D., Developmental Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 1994
M.S., Developmental Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, 1991
B.A., Psychology & Education, Swarthmore College, 1989

Recent Publications

Book Chapters

Knutson, K. & Crowley, K. (in press). Connecting with Art: How families talk about art in a museum setting. M.K. Stein & L. Kucan (Eds). Instructional Explanations in the Disciplines.

Conference Proceedings/Yearbooks

Bernstein, D. & Crowley, K. (in press). Can robots think for themselves? Identifying spaces for the exploration of children’s ideas about robots. In the proceedings of Computer Human Interaction.

Journal Articles

Eberbach, C.E. & Crowely, K. (2009). From Everyday to Scientific Observation: How Children Learn to Observe the Biologist’s World. Review of Educational Research, 79 (1), 39-69.
Bernstein, D. & Crowley, K. (2008). Searching for Signs of Intelligent Life: An Investigation of Young Children’s Beliefs About Robot Intelligence. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 17:2, 225-247.

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Recent Course Instruction

Spring 2010 (2104)

Fall 2009 (2101)

Summer 2009 (2097)

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Recent Presentations

Crowley, K. (April 2009). Thoughts on identity and motivation in informal science education. American Educational Research Association, San Diego, CA.

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Current Professional Participation

Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), I am a co-principal investigator for a National Science Foundation-funded center that works to strengthen and connect the informal science education community by catalyzing conversation and collaboration across the entire field with a focus on improving practice, documenting evidence of impact, and communicating the contributions of informal science education. [2007-2012] http://www.insci.org
Journal of the Learning Sciences, editor of the out of school learning strand, 2009-2012.

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Recent Grants

National Science Foundation, Center for the Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE), $4,999,591, June 1, 2007 to May 31, 2012. Pollack (PI), Crowley (Co-PI), Falk (Co-PI), & Freidman (Co-PI).
National Science Foundation, City as Learning Lab: Spreading Technological Fluency Through Creative Robotics, $1,884,875. March 2008 to February 2012. Crowley (PI), DiSalvo (Co-PI), Nourbakhsh (Co-PI).
Manchester Craftsmen’s Guild, Understanding the student and community impact of arts-based youth programs, $216, 248. February 2008 to January 2010. PI’s: Crowley & Knutson.
National Science Foundation, InformalScience.org: Building a Web Community for Informal Science, $675,348, July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2008. Crowley (PI) & Louw (Co-PI).
Carnegie Mellon University, Neighborhood Nets, $25,000, May 1, 2007 to December 31, 2008. Crowley (PI). [Subaward from a grant to CMU from Intel]

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