There are many reasons to be curious about the way people learn, and the past several decades have seen an explosion of research that has important implications for individual learning, schooling, workforce training, and policy. In 2000, "How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition" was published and its…

To investigate similarity judgements in different cultural contexts, the performance of two groups of children on seven similarity tasks and on two tests of metaphor was compared. The 45 Canadian and 45 Canadian-Greek children (ages 5, 8, and 11) had different cultural and linguistic backgrounds but common schooling experiences. The seven tasks…

This paper attempts to specify the ways in which bilingualism might affect cognitive functioning. Two general ways, the "linguistic" and the "non-linguistic," are distinguished. Linguistic explanations explain the effects of bilingualism on cognition as a direct result of the fact that the bilingual has access to two verbal…

Examines changes in the broad cultural background which provide the context for thinking, and how such life-style changes may have influenced the decline of reasoning skills and styles fundamental to the sciences. Considers peasant/rural farming, new world, and postaffluent society life-styles and science education in the latter. (Author/SK)

Recall lists were presented to 40 black lower class and 40 white middle class children in this experiment. The purpose of the study was to examine a possible explanation of the relatively poor performance of black and lower class children on tasks requiring abstract learning abilities. It was reasoned that the threshold for the production of…

The researcher conducted a six-month ethnographic study as an apprentice carpenter in Cape Town, South Africa, to document the valid mathematical ideas that are embedded in the everyday woodworking activities of a group of carpenters. A secondary objective was to examine and to give a firsthand account of the teaching and learning of mathematical…