Biological thought: A cross cultural view

本计画将研究儿童在生物领域的知识习得。 我们的目标是更好地了解孩子们给课堂带来了什么生物知识，以及这些知识是如何组织起来支持推理和解释的。 虽然儿童对生物学的理解已经在相当多的研究中进行了研究，但很少有人关注在不同文化背景下长大的儿童和具有不同经验水平的成年人之间的生物学知识可能存在差异的问题。 由于该领域的现有工作表明，成人对生物种类和生态关系的概念因文化和经验而异，儿童对自然的理解也可能因文化和经验而异。 如果我们要实现世纪的教育目标，那么识别生物知识中的跨文化差异和共性是很重要的。 同样重要的是，建立能够准确反映世界各地人民知识和经验多样性的理论。 该项目将包括一些未得到充分研究的人口，包括城市和农村多数文化儿童、城市墨西哥移民儿童、农村美洲土著儿童、农村Yukatek Maya和Ladino儿童。 儿童和成人将被赋予各种任务，以探索他们潜在的生物概念（例如“活着”），过程和关系。 此外，这项研究还将研究亲子二人组和其他有助于塑造儿童生物学概念的信息来源。 这项研究将测试关于生物知识的哪些方面可能是普遍的，哪些方面因文化和经验而异，以及这些变化如何与正式教学相互作用的具体理论。 这项研究与科学教育直接相关。 重要的是，要让孩子们把理解带到课堂上，以便建立在他们的真实的世界经验的基础上，并在错误观念出现时加以纠正。 忽视真实的世界经验，就有可能无法理解学习一般科学，特别是生物学的教育可能性。

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.