Roger Schank

Roger Carl Schank (March 12, 1946 – January 29, 2023) was an American artificial intelligence theorist, cognitive psychologist, learning scientist, educational reformer, and entrepreneur. Beginning in the late 1960s, he pioneered conceptual dependency theory (within the context of natural language understanding) and case-based reasoning, both of which challenged cognitivist views of memory and reasoning. He began his career teaching at Yale University and Stanford University. In 1989, Schank was granted $30 million in a ten-year commitment to his research and development by Andersen Consulting, through which he founded the Institute for the Learning Sciences (ILS) at Northwestern University in Chicago. Quotes intelligence comes about in part from real focus (goal-directed behavior); (this is why you have the absent minded professor caricature[.] it is a rare woman who is not first and foremost focussed on what others are thinking and feeling about her[.] hard to be brilliant if you are worrying if you look fat or why another woman hates you or why you dont own a kelly bag[.] Email to Jeffrey Epstein, January 4, 2010Kutz Jessica The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM https://19thnews.org/2026/02/epstein-files-academic-research-women-scientists/ The 19th 23 February 2026 en-us 23 February 2026 I'm not suggesting that teachers never tell the truth, only that it isn't necessary to do it all the time. Since coming to one's own conclusions is mostly how we learn, the real job of a teacher is to force students to come to sensible conclusions by confronting what they already believe with stuff that is antithetical to those beliefs. A confused person has only 2 choices. Admit he is confused and doesn't care, or resolve the confusion. Resolving the confusion invloves thinking. Teachers can encourage thinking by making sure students have something confusing to think about. There are endless books about what every third grader must know that use the idea that factual knowledge is the basis of the ability to read as their justification. Unfortunately, the writers of these tracts have misunderstood the cognitive science behind those statements. It is difficult to read things when you don't understand what they are about, but it does not follow from that thatthe solution is to ram that knowledge down kids' throats and then have them read. It is much more clever to have them read about what they know and to gradually increase their knowledge through stories that cause them to have to learn more in order to make the stories understandable to them Certain things need to be done again and again in life, but those things can be learned only in context, not as an abstraction. Different contexts must be provided in order to motivate students and to provide real world skills that will be remembered, not because they were studied and tested but because they were practicied again and again. ... Let me start with the top mistakes that teachers make. Some of these mistakes are forced on teachers by a badly designed education system, and some are ones that teachers make no matter what they are teaching or which system they are teaching in. Some of these are less than obvious, so let's consider them one-by-one. External links Category: living people Category:Psychologists from the United States Category:Engineers from the United States Category:Computer scientists from the United States Category:Entrepreneurs Category:Yale University faculty Category:Stanford University faculty Category:1946 births Category:2023 deaths