Transforming Education Through Neuroscience Award Recipient: Kurt Fischer

Address correspondence to Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, University of Southern California, 3641 Watt Way Suite B17, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2520;e-mail: immordin@usc.edu. International Mind, Brain, and Education Society (IMBES) and the Learning and the Brain Conference, the award was announced at the 22nd meeting of the Learning & the Brain Conference in San Francisco on February 21, and presented at the second biannual IMBES conference in Philadelphia on May 30, 2009. The mission of IMBES is to relate research and theory from all scholarly fields that are relevant to connecting information on mind and brain to educational issues and questions, to learn about biological influences on development and to improve theory and practice in education. Dr. Fischer’s life work played an important role in establishing this enterprise, beginning with his seminal 1980 paper, ‘‘A theory of cognitive development: The control and construction of hierarchies of skills,’’ in which he explicitly modeled the basic developmental process of hierarchical integration. His model described lifespan development and moment-to-moment learning as processes involving the coordination and complexification of cognitive and emotional knowledge structures into usable skills for thinking and acting in the world. The hierarchical organization of behavior and thinking had been an important but relatively implicit construct in developmental theorizing for nearly a century, beginning with the work of Piaget, Vygotsky, and other classic theorists. Fischer’s work integrated and clarified these earlier theories, and helped lay the foundation for relating them to biological developmental evidence, including the development of the brain. His approach has influenced the fields of cognitive science, neuroscience, and education, because it allows for the developmental analysis of learning from a combined psychosocial and biological perspective that maintains validity and reliability without reducing the ‘‘messiness’’ of doing research in real-life contexts such as schools and families. Kurt Fischer’s research and teaching have profoundly influenced a whole generation of students, junior and senior colleagues, both in education and in the sciences. ‘‘At a time when few people were thinking about meaningful connections and interactions between neuroscience, cognitive