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This article examines how student learning is a product of the experiential interaction between person and environment. We draw from the theoretical perspective of complexity to shed light on the emergent, adaptive, and unpredictable nature of students' learning experiences. To understand the relationship between the environment and the student learning experience, we followed undergraduate college students while they conducted independent, original research during an 8-week U.S. National Science Foundation-funded Research Experience for Undergraduates. As we examined the scholars' actions and interactions-through their daily journals and regular face-to-face interviews-we utilized the theoretical lens of complexity to understand their experiences. The students' frustrations, challenges, failures, and successes revealed that their learning was an unpredictable and emergent experience rather than one that could be described as step-by-step and mechanistic.

In my 26 years of teaching… I have never come across a more powerful teaching and learning structure than Storyline. (Lindberg, 2007, p.164)Each time I used a Storyline topic, I was struck by its effectiveness in engaging my pupils in a way that brought the best out in them. (Adamson, 2007, p.194)Like the two teachers quoted above, we have been impressed with the effectiveness of the teaching and learning method Storyline. We have seen that Storyline is effective for learners in primary and secondary schools as well as in university and community settings. We believe that this effectiveness is in large part due to how Storyline uses principles from educational psychology which are currently seen as helpful to learners. This paper is a short examination of Storyline from the educational psychology perspective. In this paper we first introduce the Storyline approach to teaching and learning. We lead the readers through a typical class which uses Storyline, and we list a variety of learning situations which have successfully used Storyline. Finally we discuss the links to the field of educational psychology.