Biological thought: A cross cultural view

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This project will study children's acquisition knowledge in the domain of biology. The goal is to understand better what biological knowledge children bring to the classroom and how this knowledge is organized to support reasoning and explanation. Although children's understanding of biology has been examined in quite a few studies, little attention has been directed at the question of how biological knowledge might vary in children being raised in different cultural settings and among adults with different levels of experience. Since the existing work in the area suggests that adult conceptions of biological kinds and ecological relationships varies with culture and experience, children's understandings of nature likely also varies with culture and experience. Identifying cross-cultural differences and commonalities in biological knowledge is important if we are to meet the educational goals of the 21st century. It is also important to build theories that reflect accurately the diversity in knowledge and experience of people around the world. The project will include a number of under-studied populations, including urban and rural majority culture children, urban Mexican immigrant children, rural Native American children, rural Yukatek Maya and Ladino children. Children and adults will be given a variety of tasks to probe their underlying biological concepts (e.g. "alive"), processes, and relationships. In addition, the research will examine parent-child dyads and other sources of information that help to shape children's conceptions of biology. The research will test specific theories about which aspects of biological knowledge are likely to be universal, which aspects vary with culture and experience, and how these variations interact with formal instruction. This research is directly relevant to science education. It is important to engage the understandings that children bring to the classroom in order to build on their real world experience and to address misconceptions when they arise. To ignore real world experience would risk failure to understand the educational possibilities for learning about science in general, and biology in particular.