Moulding Minds

Samuel T. Moulton ’01, director of educational research and assessment at the Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, is not averse to a little battiness.He wears his ties skinny and his jeans tight. He counts Harvard psychologists J. Richard Hackman and Mahzarin R. Banaji and “the spirit of William James” among his role models. And during his years as a graduate student he researched parapsychology, the study of scientifically inexplicable mental phenomena.

“I spent much of my graduate career researching extrasensory perception”—more commonly known as ESP—”which is actually not as deranged as it sounds,” Moulton says. “Well, it was a little batty, but utterly fascinating too.”

But despite his extensive research on divining the unknown, Moulton never predicted that his research in psychology would lead him to study—and teach about—how people learn.

As a Harvard graduate student, Moulton designed countless experiments to test for the existence of ESP. But after several years without confirmation of the phenomenon, he found himself gravitating toward applications of existing knowledge about the mind rather than speculation about how the mind could work.

“I found myself pretty expert in terms of research methodology but with no research program and somewhat disillusioned with psychological science,” Moulton says.

Armed with years of null data and a reputation as a skeptic of parapsychology, he looked instead to “the application of foundational research findings to vital real-world questions.”

Now a HILT director, Moulton stands not at the edge of perception but at a new frontier of teaching techniques. And in many ways, it is his background in psychological science that prepared him to help define the next big innovations in higher education.

SCHOOLHOUSE ROCK

Moulton first tried teaching while volunteering at a prison with a Phillips Brooks House Association program during his undergraduate and graduate years. He led weekly classes for inmates on recent developments in psychology.

His students were hungry for the information, Moulton says. Although Moulton had worked as a teaching fellow and instructor for undergraduate psychology courses while working toward his PhD, it was not until teaching a course on the science of pedagogy that he considered the study of learning and teaching as a career path.

“I was pleasantly surprised to learn that there was such a thing as a science of pedagogy and shocked that it wasn’t being systematically incorporated into practice and policy,” Moulton says.

His mentor, Stephen M. Kosslyn, perceived the makings of an educator in Moulton right away.

“He was particularly interested in topics that spoke to ways that people could improve themselves,” Kosslyn writes in an email.

UP TO THE HILT

“I don’t teach, for the first time in my life,” Moulton says with a hint of irony of his job at HILT. But in his administrative capacity, Moulton hopes to continue applying the lessons of psychological sciences to the practice of teaching in higher education.

HILT is a presidential initiative founded at Harvard in 2011 with a donation from Law School graduates Rita E. and Gustave M. Hauser. It is intended as an umbrella organization that facilitates innovation and excellence in learning and instruction, says Erin Driver-Linn, another director of HILT.

Once a teaching fellow in Moulton’s freshman class on personality psychology, Driver-Linn now works with him to design teaching methods that best complement the way students learn. Driver-Linn says that HILT is part of a larger wave of experiments in education that the University is exploring, including virtual education platform edX.

“Just looking in the press you would recognize that this is an interesting moment for higher education,” Driver-Linn said. “There is so much interest right now among faculty about learning and teaching.”

On any given day, Moulton can be found crunching numbers on spreadsheets, advising potential grantees at Harvard’s graduate schools, or combing professional literature for information on a proposal’s topic.

“He has an interesting background in the social sciences, but he does it in rigorous ways,” says Alexander G. Bick ’10, an MD/PhD student who received a HILT Hauser grant for an innovative approach to dissection and surgery.

Moulton once clustered the HILT project proposals by key words instead of discipline to identify common techniques that cut across the University. “He got people who wouldn’t have thought their projects had anything to do with each other talking,” Bick recalls.

STUDYING STUDYING

Since its inauguration in Jan. 2011, HILT has fielded over 255 applications from 644 people seeking funding for innovative educational programs. Of those, 47 grants have been approved for implementation this academic year. The projects range from new formats for test-taking to studies on sound in the classroom.

One grantee, Acting Chair of the Department of the History of Science Anne Harrington ’82, is redesigning the sophomore tutorial for newly declared concentrators to emphasize case studies rather than lectures.

“The result is that the students are not only learning the material, but also learning how to lead,” Harrington says.

In another HILT-funded project, sociology professors Kaia Stern and Bruce Western plan to expand the reach of the Prison Studies Project, previously a junior tutorial in which students traveled to a prison to learn alongside the incarcerated. Now the class is open to as many students as the program can accommodate, regardless of their year or concentration

.“Our work in classrooms cuts us off from social justice that we say we’re committed to.” Stern said.

While Driver-Linn and Moulton are both excited about HILT’s potential to revolutionize pedagogical methods, they are hesitant to make projections about its future success.

Moulton seems to hearken back to his days as a graduate student disproving psychic ability when he cautions against attempts at prescience.

“Prediction is very hard, especially about the future,” he says. “No one can know how it will turn out, but no matter what, it will be better for students.”

—Staff writer Jessica A. Barzilay can be reached at jessicabarzilay@college.harvard.edu.