Collaborative Research: The Role of Culture and Experience in
Children's Understandings of the Biological World

Intellectual Merit. The purpose of our project was to discover how fundamental concepts of the biological world unfold in different learning contexts and across cultural groups. Because prior research was limited almost exclusively to urban, technologically-saturated populations, it was not possible to identify which findings concerning children’s understandings of biology were universal or whether and how they might vary with language, experience and cultural orientations. Our previous research with children from diverse linguistic and cultural communities has revealed a number of commonalities, but also distinct contributions of language, culture and experience. Our present studies involved primarily urban and rural European-American and Native-American communities with a specific focus on young children ranging from early childhood to early adolescence.

Empirical Findings. First of all, we have replicated earlier findings that 5-6 year old urban children have a very human-centered understanding of biology and tend to anthropomorphize (attribute human qualities to) nonhuman animals. This finding could derive from the fact that children have more experience with other humans than with other animals. Interestingly, rural Native-American and European-American children of the same age do not show this pattern. Even more striking, 3-4 year old urban children also do not show a human-centered biology, suggesting that learned cultural models rather than expertise and experience are in play. Exposure to media portraying anthropomorphic representations of animals (as in Disney movies) may be one factor in this tendency. Indeed, in other studies we have demonstrated that showing young urban (7-8 year old) children a short movie clip that portrays animals in human roles primes their tendency to show a human-centered biology. Culture also affects children’s understandings of biology. Rural Native-American (Menominee) children are more likely to generalize biological properties from animals to humans and more likely to engage in ecological reasoning than their European-American counterparts.

 We have conducted other studies examining the effects of language on children’s understandings of biology. For example, the English term “animal” is ambiguous in that it is used in both an inclusive sense (humans are also animals) and an exclusive sense (humans are not animals). Other languages like Indonesian have only the exclusive sense and we have found that this difference affects both young children’s biological reasoning and their ease of learning that plants are alive. We have also studied the integration of everyday language terms like “animal” with more technical terms like “mammal.” We find, for example, that children commonly agree that humans are mammals and that mammals are animals but deny that humans are animals. We hope to use these observations to design more effective teaching materials for biology.

 At a more abstract level our findings are consistent with cultural differences in framework theories that differ both in the role of humans in nature and the subjective proximity of nature to humans (e.g., a part of nature versus apart from nature).  These results are important because they show a consistent pattern across a wide array of measures ranging from category-based induction, to children’s imitation of animals, to the conventions for illustrations in children’s books. There are significant implications of our research on theories of cognition and to science education more broadly.

Broader Impacts. An integral component of thi...

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