Biological Thought: A Cross-Cultural View

这项建议涉及跨文化和跨发展的生物学知识和推理进化中的基本问题。研究人员早就认识到，儿童并不是玫瑰花片。相反，他们带来了关于世界的理论和概念。当这些与成人的理论截然不同时，儿童现有的理论可能会成为学习的障碍。多年的研究表明，成年人认为核心的概念(例如，活的、动物的)在儿童中可能会以完全不同的方式表现出来。不幸的是，这项先前的研究几乎完全集中在中产阶级、城市和技术先进的人群。这种狭窄的经验基础使得无法确定a)这些儿童持有的理论是否具有普遍性，b)这些早期理论是如何被文化和输入条件塑造的，c)如何最好地描述发展变化背后的机制。这项提议的目标是通过确定不同文化群体的幼儿的核心生物学概念和推理来纠正这一限制，并追踪他们成年后的发展轨迹。人口包括芝加哥(郊区；城市)、威斯康星州(农村主要文化)、美国农村土著(梅诺米尼人)、墨西哥(尤卡泰克·玛雅人、拉迪诺人)。通过分析各种发展动机和模式，极大地扩展了关于概念发展的数据库，并提供了对规范性理论的新理解。每个种群参与了4个系列的实验，每个实验都针对生物领域内不同的知识方面。实验任务包括：(1)姓名生成，(2)推理任务，(3)亲子言语二元组，(4)课堂和其他教学内容的民族志描述。这些发展的、跨文化的实验将帮助我们确定哪些生物学概念(如果有的话)是普遍的，并确定这些概念是如何被个人所沉浸的文化塑造的。因此，了解关于生物世界的特定文化概念及其如何运作，对于理解学习生物学的教育可能性--这是21世纪任何科学课程的新基石--以及维护环境健康，可能至关重要。

This proposal addresses fundamental issues in the evolution of biological knowledge and reasoning, across cultures and across development. Researchers have long recognized that children are not tabulae rosae. Instead, they bring with them theories and concepts of the world. When these differ radically from those of adults, children's existing theories can be obstacles to learning. Years of research have suggested that the very concepts that adults hold as central (e.g., alive, animal), may be represented in an altogether different fashion in children. Unfortunately, this prior research has focused almost exclusively on middle-class, urban, technologically-advanced populations. This narrow empirical base makes it impossible to determine a) whether the theories held by these children are universal, b) how these early theories are shaped by culture and input conditions, c) how to best characterize the mechanisms underlying developmental change. The goal of this proposal is to redress this limitation by identifying core biological concepts and reasoning in young children from different cultural groups and to trace their developmental trajectories into adulthood. Populations include Chicago (suburban; urban), Wisconsin (rural majority culture; rural native American (Menominee); Mexico (Yukatek Maya; Ladino). dramatically expands the database on concept development and provides new understanding of normative theories by analyzing the various developmental motivations and patterns. Each population participates in 4 series of experiments, each aimed at a different aspect of knowledge within the biological domain. Experimental tasks include: (1) name generation, (2) reasoning tasks, (3) parent-child speech dyads, and (4) ethnographic description of classroom and other instructional content. These developmental, cross-cultural experiments will help us ascertain which biological concepts (if any) are universal, and determine how these are shaped by the culture in which an individual is immersed. Ensuing knowledge of particular cultural conceptions about the biological world and how it works may be critical in understanding the educational possibilities for learning about biology - the new cornerstone of any science curriculum in the twenty-first century - and for maintaining environmental health.