This month researchers made the case for a “new science of learning” that has the potential to remake education, offering fresh evidence of science’s growing role in the conversation about early learning’s importance.

In this month’s Science journal, researchers explored how breakthroughs in neuroscience, psychology and machine learning are helping us understand how we learn. What is even more interesting is that these findings may extend beyond early learning and help us understand “the origins of human intelligence.”

Much of the paper focuses on how kids learn, highlighting the importance of social interaction, the limits of television in the first years of life and new findings about babies.

"Babies learn simply by listening, for example. They learn the sounds and words of their language by picking up probabilistic information as they listen to us talk to them. Babies at 8 months are calculating statistically and learning," Patricia Kuhl, co-director of the University of Washington’s Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, said in a summary.

In another setback for baby-targeted television, TV doesn’t appear to be a huge help to infants.

“They take in more information by looking at another person face to face than by looking at that person on a big plasma TV screen," Kuhl added. "We are now trying to understand why the brain works this way, and what it means about us and our evolution."

Overall, the paper tackles broad, deep and complex topics – I will dig deeper in the coming days because a lot is still over my head. However, it doesn’t reject technology as an aspect of teaching. In fact, authors do the opposite by raising intriguing ideas about the intersection of education, robots and technology.

Research suggests children are more receptive to learning from “social robots” that look more like us and interact, the summary says.

"Science is trying to understand the magic of social interaction in human learning,"  said lead author Andrew Meltzoff, co-chair of the Institute and the UW’s Job and Gertrud Tamaki Endowed Chair. "But when it does we hope to embody some of what we learn into technology. Kids today are using high-powered technology – Facebook, Twitter and text messaging – to enhance social interaction. Using technology, children are learning to solve problems collaboratively. Technology also allows us to have a distributed network from which to draw information, a world of knowledge."