Culture and Learning Ms. Carmelitano

Bell ringer Read this list. You will be asked to recall it later JUST READ IT DO NOT WRITE IT DOWN. Spoon - Shorts Carrot - Nail Shirt - Fork Hammer - Tomato Celery - Dress Knife Screw Pants

Cultural factors in Cognition Memory, thinking, and problem solving are all influenced by up-bringing (Culture) Our Schemas are also based on our up- brining (Culture)

Schema Review What are Schemas?

Activity Now write down the list of words from the Bell-Ringer

Cross-Cultural research – the Role of Schooling on Remembering It was once thought that all people learn the same way When memory tests were given to people in non- western countries, they preformed poorly, when compared to westerners This was used as “evidence” that westerners were “smarter” than non-westerners BUT you must have insight in language and culture of people if you want to test their memory accurately Culture will not affect the ability to learn, but the memory strategies used to encode and store information

Cole and Scribner (1974) AIM: Compared the memory recall of a series of words in the US and in Liberia (Kpelle people) Procedure: 1. Observed the day-to day activities of the children in both cultures 2. Gave children a list of items from 4 categories: utensils, cloths, tools, vegetables 3. Then asked the children to recall as many items as possible 4. Researchers found that the children from the US were more successful than the children from Liberia 5. The researchers then allowed the students to study the words again, and repeat the task

Results Non-Schooled : No improvement was made on performance even after re-reading the words Recalled 10 items on first try. After fifteen practice rounds, the averaged only increased to 12 recalled words Those who had attended School: Children preformed much better (From both Liberia and the US) To remember the words, they put the words into categories – CHUNKING The non-schooled Liberian children did not appear to use any chunking or rehearsal method Trying to read them over and over in order to remember how they were placed

Chunking and listing The children who had grouped the items to remember them performed a strategy called Chunking This is when we group items in a list together in a meaningful way to remember them Others remembered the words through listing Rehearsing the words over and over to encode them into their LTM

Narrative When words are presented in a meaningful way as part of a story Cole and Scribner found that the illiterate children were able to remember the words when they were presented as part of a story, in a meaningful way Results supported by other cross-cultural research done by Rogoff and Wadell (1982) Mayan children could recall objects if they were related in a meaningful way to the local scenery.

Rogoff and Wadell (1982) AIM: to investigate cross cultural differences between Mayan children and those from the US, in learning Other studies suggested that Mayan children performed poorer on memory tasks than those from the US, Participants: 30 US children and 30 Mayan children from Guatemala. Procedure: 1. The researchers constructed a diorama ( a 3D miniature scene) of a Mayan village located near a mountain and a lake, similar to the place in which the children lived. They also constructed a diorama of a scene in the US for the American children (from salt lake city). 2. Each child watched as 20 miniature objects from a set of 80 were placed in the diorama. The objects included cars, animals, people, and furniture-just the kind of things that would be found in a real town. 3. Then the 20 objects were returned to the original group. After a few minutes, the children were asked to reconstruct the full scene they had been shown.

Findings Under these conditions, the memory performance of the Mayan children was slightly superior to that of their United States counterparts. They concluded that children of any culture are skilled at remembering if information is presented in a meaningful context. (Narrative Form)

What does it all mean? Although the ability to remember is universal, the ways to do it are not. School usually presents children with information processing tasks, such as organizing information in memory, using logical and abstract symbols to solve problems Traditional society children remember in ways that are relevant to their lives. They remember things in a more narrative format