THE LEARNING SCIENCE CONFERENCE 2026

Where Research Meets Practice

OVERVIEW

Bridge the gap between research and practice: join the Learning Science Conference 2026.

The Learning Science Conference is Learning Development Accelerator’s signature event, focused on the foundational science behind how people learn, and what that means for learning design decisions.

Each year, we go deep into the mechanisms that shape learning: memory, retrieval, cognitive load, motivation, feedback, assessment, and more. Not as abstract theory, but as practical insight you can use to design more effective learning experiences.

This conference is designed to ground new learning professionals and to refresh, sharpen, and deepen the judgment of experienced designers and leaders. Because without an understanding of learning science, everything else we do in L&D rests on shaky ground.

During the conference, you will:

• Deepen your understanding of how learning happens.

• Gain readily applicable evidence-based tools.

• Network with leading thinkers and practitioners.

Whether you design, deliver, manage, or support learning, you’ll leave with actionable insight and renewed confidence in creating learning that truly sticks.

WHAT’S IN IT?

The Learning Science Conference is where learning professionals come together around evidence-based L&D.

The conference is a one-month experience that includes:

• 9 practical topics to explore the nuances of learning presented by the expert speakers

• 5 special events to spark reflection and expand your perspective

• Asynchronous and live, online sessions

• A dedicated forum to interact with speakers and fellow attendees

• The Learning Science Café. A participant-led space for informal conversations, connection, and reflection.

Our handpicked speakers will dive into the science of how learning happens, covering: encoding, retrieval, emotion, motivation, multi-media, social learning, assessment & measurement, feedback, and more. You’ll walk away with the insights and tools you need to design solutions that are engaging and effective.

And because the conference is paced intentionally, you’ll have time to watch sessions, reflect, try ideas in your own context, and then join the live sessions with questions—so you can learn from peers and get feedback from experienced experts.

HOW IT WORKS (conference Format)

The Learning Science Conference isn’t a single-day event! It’s a month-long learning experience designed to support deep thinking, reflection, and application, not passive consumption. That’s why we are using a hybrid format, which means

You’ll have time to think, question, revisit ideas, and connect theory to real learning challenges. We want you to leave with clearer next steps for applying what you learned.

Conference Schedule at a glance

Ready to plan your Learning Science Conference experience? The schedules below will help you see what’s happening throughout the asynchronous weeks and during the live online week.

CONFERENCE TOPICS and SESSION Structure

Each topic will have an asynchronous video presentation and two live featured sessions (90 minutes long) to accommodate differences in time zones as much as possible. Plus, you’ll be invited to five special sessions (60 minutes long), including panel-style conversations and other curated gatherings, to explore ideas from multiple angles and connect with the community.

All sessions are recorded, so you always have an opportunity to review even after the session.

Featured Sessions

90 minutes, repeated 2 times to accomodate different time zones, all times are in Eastern Standard time.

What’s in our sensory memory doesn’t come to conscious awareness unless it’s attended to within cognitive load constraints. Which means that if we want folks to learn, we have to make sure we understand this process enough to design for it. In this session, we’ll cover the ways attention - a complex phenomenon - operates, and what the cognitive load constraints mean. You’ll leave with an understanding of how and when to limit content, and how to focus attention appropriately.

What do we mean by assessment and evaluation? How can you collect meaningful evidence of performance and use actionable data to strengthen your learning and development efforts? The hybrid sessions are designed for learning leaders, accreditation bodies, training managers, and anyone who is responsible for assessing others or designing assessments that demonstrate performance. In the pre-recorded session, we’ll define assessment and evaluation and explore:

• How you collect evidence for performance and competence not just knowledge.

• Why you need to move beyond knowledge checks to more rigorous assessment of skills.

• How you select the most effective assessment method to produce meaningful, actionable data.

• How you use AI to support and facilitate assessment design.

• And why you should integrate your assessment with evaluation exercise.

  In the live session, we ‘ll work through cases and AI-generated examples that explore the how and why of assessing skills more rigorously. You’ll leave the sessions with handouts, test-design guidelines, and AI prompts that you can use to develop and improve your own assessments.

How does the brain determine what matters, filter distractions, and guide thoughtful decisions? In this session, Dr. Nuri Jeong, neuroscientist and founder of Goals Unhindered, explores inhibition, a fundamental brain process that helps us learn what matters and make strategic decisions. Drawing on her recent research published in Nature, she will introduce the STAR framework and show how these neuroscience principles can inform learning and development through real-world case studies. No background in neuroscience or biology is required.

Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, the researchers behind deliberate practice, wrote that the basic skills for living in a culture are "acquired by virtually all children as part of normal social interaction," with almost no instruction. As L&D professionals, we have built on that assumption for decades. We build programs to help people give feedback, navigate conflict, develop executive presence, support motivation, and lead through change. We take for granted that they can already hold eye contact, sit through a pause, be wrong out loud, initiate conversation, and stay present when that conversation gets uncomfortable. But as our world becomes more remote and more integrated with technology, these basic skills can atrophy - or fail to be acquired in the first place. What happens when normal social interaction becomes optional? In this active session, we explore these taken-for-granted skills as the curriculum. You will name the interaction muscles your own programs assume, then work with ways to strengthen them. Come ready to engage with your fellow humans!

What is in conscious awareness doesn’t automatically transfer to long term memory to guide performance. On the contrary, we need specific activities that develop our understandings. What, then, do we need to do? In this session we’ll look at the different types of information needed, and talk about how we develop the necessary material to achieve the desired understanding. We’ll look at schemas, mental models, examples, and feedback as critical parts of the necessary learnings.

Objectives are often the first formalized design artifact — and the first step toward a project going off track. Learning professionals rarely skip analysis, but it is often just a pro forma effort: conclusions are drawn and then set aside, never actually shaping the objective they were meant to inform. This session offers a practical framework for closing that gap — strengthening the link between analysis and objective so design decisions are grounded in evidence.

Before learning can happen, information first has to be noticed, organized, and interpreted. In this presentation, you’ll explore how visual and audio perception and working memory shape the way people process instructional media. Using practical examples, you’ll experience the principles of pop-out, perceptual grouping, abstraction, framing, reduced realism, and integrating related information. You’ll see how small design decisions can make important information stand out, how to reduce unnecessary mental effort, and how to help learners make sense of what they see.

Improving our practice requires us to keep seeking out new input, new data, and new understanding, and then to try implementing what we find. There's rarely a safe place to do that, because our work tends to be live and real-world, and there aren't many opportunities to practice in low-stakes environments. So many teams never do; they stick with what's safe rather than reaching for the most effective thing they could be doing.

Experiment-led design borrows from agile methodology, product thinking, and performance consulting, and focuses on how we can run rapid workplace experiments to test new ideas with minimal risk. This session takes us from identifying a performance deficit, through creating a hypothesis and an experiment to test it, setting stop conditions and reading the results, to letting the experiment define our next steps.

All too often, we think a motivated learner learns. Unfortunately, the most motivated learner, with an ineffective learning design excitedly learns… well… nothing. Or worse, can even get worse or shut down. Don’t get us wrong, motivation is crucial to the learning process. It is the Willing part of getting Able. But motivation has a different role. Motivation gets your folks into the room. Motivation supports their struggles as they engage what hopefully is an appropriate methodology. And motivation provides the required energy after the program to practice, take in feedback, and continue the work. Based on the 50 years of research behind self-determination theory, this session will:

• Explore the different types of motivation that can support or undermine the learning process.

• Apply a checklist comprising of the motivational building blocks you can put in place as you design to ensure a more relevant, involving, and structured program.

• Discover where exactly motivation plugs in before, during, and after the learning engagement.

Special Sessions

60-90 minutes, one session, all times are in Eastern Standard time.

A conference is more than just the presentations, though they're the focus. Still, it's the connections you make with others that also makes an event worthwhile. It's seldom that you leave without some new colleagues, as well as presenters to connect with. To that end, we're instituting an event to help facilitate that outcome, and who better than Kat Koppett, maestro of improvisation and the implications for organizational effectiveness. She'll lead us through engaging activities to help us know ourselves, and others, better. Come for the connections, stay for the fun.

During the session, Matt Richter will ask Paul Kirschner questions about how learning happens. Taking a high-level view, we will explore the human information processing loop, cognitive load, desirable difficulties, strategies for different learning objectives, types of practice, and more. You will also have the chance to question Paul and get all your questions answered, as well.

Clark Quinn, LDA’s Co-Director, has been serving as Learning Science Advisor to startup elevator9. In the course of this effort to put learning science into action, there have been substantial learnings about taking spacing and making it useful as a followon to traditional training events, leading to measurable impact. In this session, Clark will host co-Founders CEO David Grad and COO Dr. Page Chen, along with Learning Analytics Architect Elizabeth Dalton, and discuss the intent, realizations, and realities of taking the results of research and building a solution that incorporates them. We’ll cover principles, learnings, and outcomes, including the preliminary results from data collection (appropriately anonymized). Come learn lessons that will apply to your own endeavors!

What does learning science reliably require? Researchers that do the studies that inform our practices, and translate them into practical guidance. In this session, we’re bringing together four formidable researchers who’s work has been critical to the insights we need on learning science.

The Bjorks, Elizabeth and Robert, have determined the requirements (and coined the phrase) of ‘desirable difficulty’. John Sweller has been responsible for investigating the limits of cognitive load, and helping us understand how to address those limitations. Paul Kirschner has worked with fellow giants in the field such as Richard Clark and Jeroen van Merriënboer to create understandings of learning that guide our pedagogical approaches.

This panel will be moderated by Nidhi Sachdeva, an up-and-coming researcher. A must-see opportunity!

This special roundtable brings together three experts, each from different on inclusion and the ethics of inclusion and accessibility. Ingeborg Kroese comes specifically from the domain of L&D and brings both research and practice to the application of accessibility, inclusion, and equity. Anne Brafford traverses both the legal and psychological fields bridging inclusion and wellbeing. She brings an SDT perspective to the conversation, as well. And Stephanie Moore is an educationalist who specializes in instructional design, ethics, and accessibility. Moderated by Matt Richter, this is sure to be both a practical and illuminating discussion.

If you have any schedule-related questions, please contact us at info@ldaccelerator.com.

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