Meet Roy Pea, 2022 McGraw Prize winner for Learning Science Research

"How things work in the everyday world is what we need to understand, not only how behavior functions and learning happens in the laboratory. If you innovate for children and for schools, you're going to learn things that then can enable things that would work better for everyone. So what the learning sciences needed to do was to get outside the laboratory. Teachers were a partner in the research from the very beginning; that is now called research-practice partnerships. That's … how to create innovations that teachers will actually use.

I built on what we had learned at the Bank Street College of Education at our Center for Children and Technology, which was the world's first word processor created for children. It was called the Bank Street Writer. The idea was to create a word processor that a kid who'd never even typed could sit down and start to write. There was a commercial version for the workplace. Suddenly we had CEOs that were using the Bank Street Writer to do their writing. If it's something that makes a kid able to do it, it's liable to help make it easier for everyone to do it."

ABOUT DR. PEA: Dr. Roy Pea’s work to enhance learning for people of all backgrounds and circumstances has been propelled by a spirit of innovation, impact and leadership lauded by the McGraw Prize. Pea is the David Jacks Professor of Education & Learning Sciences at the School of Education at Stanford University, where he also was the director of the H-STAR Institute and co-director and co-principal investigator of the LIFE Center. Pea’s body of work is vast; he has built training programs in learning technology and design at universities, created research partnerships, and developed professional development programs for teachers and K–12 learning technologies. He is a past president of the International Society for the Learning Sciences and co-author of the 2010 National Education Technology Plan for the U.S. Department of Education.