Cultural Modeling

Why Attention to the Role of Culture in Learning?

CM is related to but distinct from culturally responsive instruction approaches partly because of its explicit attention to learning in the academic disciplines. Like culturally responsive instruction, CM is part of a broader move in education to address the centrality of culture to human learning and is part of a broad class of research and pedagogical practices aimed at enhancing equity in opportunity to learn. According to 2010 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results, there are some 17 countries in which academic outcomes on the PISA are not predicted by class and where low-income students score high on the international PISA measures. However, in most industrialized nations students from particular ethnic minorities and from low-income families still do not fare equitably compared with their middle-class peers on academic assessments or other academic outcomes such as college entry and graduation rates. Cultural variation based on race, ethnicity, and class are significant features of nearly every industrialized nation. CM is one framework for scaffolding the wide cultural repertoires students construct from their everyday experiences to address these widespread inequities in education.

Contributions from Basic Research

Research in cognition has documented the importance of prior knowledge to human learning. Human brains are efficient at encoding knowledge gleaned from past experience to serve as resources for new learning. However, research demonstrates how misconceptions from everyday learning can be challenging to transform, suggesting the power of such tacit knowledge. Long-standing assumptions about cultural deficits related to race, ethnicity, and class have led to educational practices that view the prior knowledge of certain students as interfering with academic learning. Such cultural deficit orientations have informed both research and practice. Early work on intelligence quotients (IQ) posited inferior innate mental abilities to particular groups of people. Language has been a particularly ripe area for such deficit thinking with regard to literacy, with historical and contemporary claims, for example, that African American English (AAE) interferes with learning to read or to solve word problems in mathematics, or that language practices among low-income families interfere with learning to read.

Expert–novice studies demonstrate differences in the structure of knowledge in the domain in question. Experts have conceptual understandings that enable them to engage in generative problem solving. Experts are able to perceive patterns that help them figure out increasingly more complex problems. For example, master chess players are able to look at an initial play and conceive the unfolding of future moves across the game. Masters of the abacus are able to calculate problems involving large numbers in their heads through mental manipulations of the abacus.

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