Federal Grant Award Summary

Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University (Virginia Tech) received a $766,200 CAREER award from the National Science Foundation's Office of Multidisciplinary Activities under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075) on July 1, 2026, with a completion date of June 30, 2031. This five-year project investigates how structured learning guides the formation of neural representations that support flexible cognition and problem-solving. The research will produce empirical findings on how different brain regions coordinate during scaffolded learning experiences to build compositional knowledge—where smaller units of knowledge function as building blocks that can be recombined to solve novel problems. Deliverables include peer-reviewed research publications, neuroscientific data and insights into the mechanisms underlying efficient human learning and generalization.

The project's findings will directly inform educational theory and practice by advancing understanding of how curricula should be structured to maximize learning efficiency, while simultaneously providing insights applicable to artificial intelligence research on data-efficient learning and transfer to new tasks. By examining when structured and unstructured learning diverge and how structured experience reshapes brain mechanisms supporting abstraction and generalization, the research addresses a critical gap between human and current artificial intelligence capabilities. The work is anticipated to yield evidence-based recommendations for curriculum design and machine learning approaches that require less data and perform more robustly across novel situations.