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Formal education and cognitive growth

Formal education and cognitive growth. School: What is it good for? (remember school cut-off designs?) Reasoning skills: examples Classification Conservation Mathematical planning Memory skills Question of transfer (Greenfield & Lave) Is symbolic insight a general skill?.

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Formal education and cognitive growth

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  1. Formal education and cognitive growth • School: What is it good for? (remember school cut-off designs?) • Reasoning skills: examples • Classification • Conservation • Mathematical planning • Memory skills • Question of transfer (Greenfield & Lave) • Is symbolic insight a general skill?

  2. Classification skills • Cole et al: age vs. schooling in rural Yucatan villages % of success • Importance of understanding the task?

  3. Conservation reasoning • Brief training accelerates aboriginal children’s performance, but still about 3-year lag • BUT: What is the role of experience? Kpelle & Peace Corps: rice quantity estimation task (Gay & Cole, 1967)

  4. Mathematical planning/reasoning • Tied to specific experience • Zimbabwean & Scottish 4th-6th graders: running a store • 84% of Zimbabwean children made profit • 45% of Scottish children made profit • Saxe: Body-counting system (Papua villiages) • Introduction of cash economy required adaptation of system for arithmetic • Villiagers who had trouble learning arithmetic strategies were at disadvantage

  5. Memory Skills • Cole et al: Recall tests • Clustering in free recall: • Mayan adults: 1/3 as much as adults w/ >= 7 yrs. school • Mestizo adults w/ up to 6 yrs. school: more clustering than unschooled adults • Learning paired associates: • H.S. = 6th > Mestizo (1-6 yrs) > 3rd > Mayan adults

  6. Transfer of Skills/Schemas:What Symbolic Skill is Good For • Greenfield & Lave: Transfer of procedural skills: • Girls in weaving societies: more skilled than U.S. women • Experienced weavers see nuances of familiar patterns • Worse than schooled boys at unfamiliar pattern • Innovation/stereotypy is tied to teaching • Video: Brazilian street-vendors • Value of informal vs. formal mathematics • Schwartz et al: Using math to learn physical principles • 5th graders: balance scale problem • Assigned to “explain instructions” or “math instructions” • Math instruction group: more accurate rule use • Higher accuracy transferred to 3-weight problems (96% vs. 35% considered both weight and distance from fulcrum)

  7. Activity: Your Informal Educational Experiences • According to Greenfield & Lave, what are characteristics of informal education? • Which ones conformed to your examples & ratings? • Data from 3 years ago…

  8. Formal vs. Informal Ed Summary • Characteristics of informal ed: • Is “teaching by demonstration” an apt description? • How do teachers adjust to students’ ability level? • Do skills transfer to other tasks? • What does schooling provide? • Better logical, memory skills (in some tasks) • Ability to generalize to new materials? • Facility with symbol and/or abstract systems • Meta-memory • Specificity of learning: • School often teaches skills that students can’t transfer!

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