LRDC History | Learning Research & Development Center

The Center's research has been equally wide ranging in the domains of learning it has studied. Reading, mathematics, and science, staples of education, have been a continuing focus over much of LRDC's 60 years. However, the Center has also addressed less-studied learning domains (e.g., history, geography, avionics, law), as well as the reasoning and intellectual abilities that serve learning across domains. Social settings for learning, including those outside of schools, teaching effectiveness, and technology for learning are all part of LRDC's research story as well. Understanding learning in its many forms and how it can be enhanced by learning environments, teaching, and learning tools will increase in importance in the coming decades across human societies. LRDC aims to continue to play a significant role in innovative research and development that furthers such understanding.

Robert Glaser
Founding Director
1963-2008

Lauren Resnick
Associate Director and Director
1977-2008

The Founding of LRDC

The Learning Research and Development Center (LRDC) sprang from a proposal written by founding director Robert Glaser and University administrator J. Steele Gowe in 1963. Their idea, as expressed in the opening sentence of the proposal was to establish a Center that stimulated interaction between educational practice and scientific knowledge: "The problem area on which this Center focuses its attention is that of expediting fruitful interaction between learning research in the behavioral sciences and instructional practice in the schools." The videos here give an overview of the Center's founding and first 50 years:

LRDC video part 1 (1963-1988)

LRDC video part 2 (1988-2013)

60th Anniversary Celebration

Please join LRDC as we celebrate the Center's 60th Anniversary.

The 60th Anniversary Report celebrates the Learning Research and Development Center's 60 years as a leading interdisciplinary center for research on learning and education. The report builds on LRDC's 50th anniversary report of 2014 ("Celebrating 50 Years of LRDC") providing glimpses of LRDC over the years and highlights from the period between 2014 and 2024, including some of the exciting work from our current research and development agenda.

Learn about LRDC Research Practice Partnerships in the Pittsburgh community. Click here for details on the LRDC 60th anniversary celebration.

60th Celebration photos

60th Celebration videos

50th Anniversary Celebration

The LRDC 50th Anniversary Report celebrates the University of Pittsburgh Learning Research and Development Center's (LRDC) 50 years as a leading interdisciplinary center for research on learning and education. It provide glimpses of LRDC over the years and highlight some of the exciting work that occupies our current research and development agenda. The Center's interconnected programs of research and development have reflected its mission of stimulating interaction between research and practice across a broad spectrum of problems, from the neural basis of learning to the development of intelligent tutors to educational policy. Among research institutions in learning and education, this interconnected breadth is unique.

The Center celebrated its 50 year history with a Gala dinner at Phipps Conservatory. View the 50 year history Gala dinner photo album.

The Iconic Building

"The architectural prima donna on O'Hara Street today is not one of the old buildings but an escalator-like structure that houses the Learning Research and Development Center ... The 1970s buildings is shaped like a giant staircase against the hillside because it was meant to act like one: the bare patch still visible on the right side of the lobby was designed to carry a huge escalator to hoist students up to the proposed dormitory complex above" (pg. 337), stated author Franklin Toker in his 1989 Pittsburgh A New Portrait (1989).