Identifying didactic and sociocultural obstacles to conceptualization through Statistical Implicative Analysis
To understand culture's relationship to cognition, this field has studied children or adults with little schooling and often alien to well-educated Western culture. Traditionally centered on extra-curricular knowledge, school-based variables must be consi
- PDF / 2,041,070 Bytes
- 33 Pages / 595.276 x 841.89 pts (A4) Page_size
- 28 Downloads / 139 Views
2
EA 3729 University of Lyon — France [email protected] University of Lyon — France [email protected]
Summary. To understand culture’s relationship to cognition, this field has studied children or adults with little schooling and often alien to well-educated Western culture. Traditionally centered on extra-curricular knowledge, school-based variables must be considered: written culture and teaching/learning strategies can generate obstacles to conceptualization. Subjects are adults who studied at least three years at university: some are professionals. Data was from short clinical-style interviews as well as a questionnaire based survey taken from an observational sample. To find regularities linked to conceptual strength, S.I.A. determined implicative rules between responses and pre-ordered structures. Results suggested representations linked to specific conceptual aspects constitute didactical and/or socio-cultural obstacles. Key words: culture and cognition, conceptualization, obstacles, scientific concepts, prototypical figures.
1 Introduction In 1744, Tatanga Mani, in his autobiography, “Indian Stoney” commented on his education “Oh yes! I went to the white man’s school. I learned how to read his schoolbooks, newspapers and the Bible. But I discovered in time that this was not enough. Civilized people depend far too much on the printed page. I turned to the book of the Great Spirit which is present in the whole of creation. You can read most of this book by studying nature. You know, if you take all your books and spread them out them under the sun and leave them for some time, the rain, snow and the insects will do their work, and not much will remain. But the Great Spirit gave you and I the chance to study at the university of Nature: the forests, the rivers, the mountains, and the animals to whom we belong” [20, Mc Luhan, 1971 p.110 in Dasen 2001]. This piece of research is situated within the field that deals with the relationship between culture and cognition [1, 26]. The subject matter takes its N.M. Acioly-Régnier and J.-C. Régnier: Identifying didactic and sociocultural obstacles to conceptualization through Statistical Implicative Analysis, Studies in Computational Intelligence (SCI) 127, 347–379 (2008) www.springerlink.com © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2008
348
Acioly-Régnier and Régnier
source in an academic teaching and learning situation, a course in the didactics of psychology given by Nadja Acioly-Régnier. In other words, the aim is to reach a better understanding of the clash between cultural rules and rationality, in particular to grasp more clearly the psychological status of the procedures and the concepts at work among social actors in various situations of work or study; here among students of psychology. Some ten years ago in Brazil, the point of departure was Nadja Acioly-Régnier’s psychology course for Masters level students and Doctorate seminars at the UFPE3 . The following situation problem was put forward to the students, based on the instruction:
Data Loading...
