Biological Thought: A Cross-Cultural View

该提案涉及跨文化和跨发展的生物知识和推理进化中的基本问题。研究人员很早就认识到，儿童并不是一颗玫瑰。相反，他们带来的是关于世界的理论和概念。当这些理论与成人的理论大相径庭时，儿童现有的理论可能会成为学习的障碍。多年的研究表明，成年人所持有的核心概念（例如，活着，动物）在儿童身上可能以完全不同的方式表现出来。不幸的是，之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身上。这种狭隘的经验基础使得我们无法确定：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受到文化和输入条件的影响；c)如何最好地描述发展变化背后的机制。本提案的目标是通过识别来自不同文化群体的幼儿的核心生物学概念和推理，并追踪他们成年后的发展轨迹，来纠正这一限制。人口包括芝加哥（郊区，城市），威斯康星州(农村多数文化，农村印第安人（梅诺米尼）；墨西哥（尤卡泰克玛雅语；拉迪诺语）。通过分析不同的发展动机和模式，极大地扩展了概念发展的数据库，并为规范理论提供了新的理解。每个群体都参与了4个系列的实验，每个系列都针对生物领域知识的不同方面。实验任务包括：(1)名字生成；(2)推理任务；(3)亲子言语对子；(4)课堂及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处的文化所塑造的。了解关于生物世界的特定文化概念及其运作方式，对于理解学习生物学的教育可能性（21世纪任何科学课程的新基石）和维护环境健康至关重要。

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.