Transcript Cole Education

How cultural factors affect
one cognitive process
Education
What is a good education?
How is education different in
different cultures / countries?
In the era before
industrialization, what would
have been considered a good
education?
According to Bruner, children of any
culture learn the basics of culture
through schooling and daily
interactions with members of the
culture in which they live.
Now read ‘An excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell, "None
of the Above: What IQ Doesn't Tell You about Race,"
New Yorker (December 17, 2007)’
Michael Cole lecture (11 mins)
In the 1960s and 1970s, Michael Cole and colleagues
conducted a series of experiments investigating two
areas of cognitive functioning.
One study looked at how the Kpelle and Vai people of
Africa performed on memory and intelligence tasks.
The other looked at the effects of schooling on
cognitive processes.
“It is hard to conduct crosscultural research when we are
immersed in it.”
Michael Cole
Cole et al set out to test the stereotype that people
from non-literate cultures have tremendous memories.
They wanted to investigate whether a cognitive process
such as memory is universal.
Memory Research
Adults from America found to use clustering when
performing free recall tasks.
Cole and Scribner (1974) found that this was not the
case with Kpelle people of Liberia.
Read Cross-cultural studies of memory and answer the
questions.
HOMEWORK
WRITE A STUDY SHEET FOR COLE ET AL’S
STUDY ON MEMORY
READ PAGES 84-86 LEVELS OF ANALYSIS IN
PSYCHOLOGY
Michael Cole: the effect of
schooling on cognition
Post 2nd world war
How could low economic development be increased?
It was thought that formal education (as opposed to
fundamental education) would take children beyond
their communities.
1960s
Many African nations began to include more formal
schooling
Based on Western schooling
What problems do you think this might
have caused?
What fraction of all coins worth less
than a pound are silver in colour?
What fraction of all coins worth less than a pound are
silver in colour?
Why might this be a tricky question for someone not
familiar with British coins?
Would being asked questions like this impede a
student’s mathematical learning?
Performance in many African schools was low.
In 1963 Michael Cole went with a group to study the
impact on formal education in Liberia.
Kpelle students found learning maths more difficult
than had been expected.
They found it hard to classify geometric shapes.
Why do you think that might be?
Cole was told that the Kpelle students
performed poorly because:
Perceptual problems meant they could not identify
geometric shapes
They could not classify
They used rote recall, rather than thinking (to try to
find an answer)
Cole did not believe this.
What kind of research could be done to test whether
these 3 assumptions were true?
Perceptual problems meant they could not identify
geometric shapes
They could not classify
They used rote recall, rather than thinking (to try to
find an answer)
READ PAGES 85-86 LEVELS OF ANALYSIS IN
PSYCHOLOGY
Then answer the questions on your handout.