Examining Conceptions of How People Learn Over the Decades Through AERA Presidential Addresses

The mission statement of the American Educational Research Association (AERA) articulates the following goals: “improving the educational process,” “advancing knowledge about education,” “[encouraging] scholarly inquiry related to education,” and “[promoting] the use of research . . . to serve the public good.” I examine AERA presidential addresses from 1948 to 2010 as windows into how the research community has conceptualized learning and explore the following questions: (a) What has evolved in the science of learning? (b) With what persistent questions has the field wrestled? (c) In what ways has the field addressed broader factors—social, cultural, political, economic—that represented the ecological contexts in which education in formal and informal settings played out in each decade?