Lauren Resnick

Career

In addition to working as a research associate for the Harvard University Committee on Programmed Instruction and Laboratory for Research in Instruction and then as a lecturer in the Office of Research and Evaluation in the Division of Teacher Education at City University of New York, Resnick also served as a Senior Scientist and Staff Consultant at Basic Systems, Inc. before accepting her first faculty position at the University of Pittsburgh. As a faculty member, educational researcher, and scholar, Resnick has dedicated more than 50 years to conducting pioneering research on learning and development, scientific understanding in children, and socially shared cognition.

As past president of the American Educational Research Association (AERA, 1986-1987) and a member of both the National Academy of Education (NAE) and International Academy of Education (IAE), she has served as an invited lecturer, visiting scholar, and keynote speaker at universities around the world.

In her book "Education and Learning to Think" (The National Academies Press, 1987) and the 1987 Presidential Address, she proposed that the concept of out of school learning is very beneficial for children and young adults. In her address she stated: "Because they are continuously engaged with objects and situations that make sense to them, people do not fall into the trap of forgetting what their calculation or their reasoning is about".