Biological Thought: A Cross-Cultural View

该提案涉及生物知识和推理在不同文化和不同发展中的演变的基本问题。 研究人员早就认识到，儿童并不是玫瑰板。 相反，他们带来了世界的理论和概念。 当这些理论与成人的理论完全不同时，儿童现有的理论可能成为学习的障碍。 多年的研究表明，成年人所持有的核心概念（例如，活着的，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，这项先前的研究几乎完全集中在中产阶级，城市，技术先进的人群。 这种狭隘的经验基础使得我们无法确定：a）这些儿童所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的; c）如何最好地描述发展变化背后的机制。 这项建议的目的是纠正这一局限性，确定核心生物概念和推理的幼儿从不同的文化群体，并跟踪他们的发展轨迹，直到成年。人口包括芝加哥（郊区;城市），威斯康星州（农村多数文化;农村土著美国人（梅诺米尼）;墨西哥（尤卡泰克玛雅;拉迪诺）。 通过分析概念发展的各种动机和模式，极大地扩展了概念发展的数据库，并提供了对规范理论的新理解。 每个种群参与4个系列的实验，每个实验针对生物学领域内知识的不同方面。 实验任务包括：（1）名字的产生，（2）推理任务，（3）父母-孩子的言语二人组，（4）课堂和其他教学内容的人种学描述。 这些发展性的跨文化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。 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（21世纪任何科学课程的新基石）和维护环境健康的教育可能性至关重要。

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.