Giyoo Hatano

Commentary: Reconceptualizing School Learning Using Insight From Expertise Research

Based on research on out-of-school expertise in workplaces and hobby activities, this commentary attempts to reconceptualize school learning and suggest desirable changes in it. Two topics are discussed in relation to the contributions of this special issue: (a) aspects of research on expert-novice differences and processes of gaining expertise that can be applied to school learning readily and profitably, and (b) situational and individual determinants of expertise differing in levels and types and their implications for learning in basic schooling.

Young Children's Conception of the Biological World

What are the components of childrens biological-knowledge system before systematic teaching at school? Can this knowledge system be called naive biology? We propose that young childrens biological-knowledge system has at least two essential components—(a) the knowledge needed to identify biological entities and phenomena and (b) teleological and vitalistic causality—and that these components constitute a form of biology. We discuss how this naive biology serves as the basis for performance and learning in socially and culturally important practices, such as health practices and biology instruction.

Qualitative changes in intuitive biology

Recent studies on children’s intuitive biology have indicated that a form of autonomous biology is acquired early in childhood and that later qualitative changes occur within the domain. In this article we focus on two of such changes: (a) In predicting behaviors and attributing properties to an animate object, young children rely on the target’s similarity to people, whereas older children and adults use its category membership and category-behavior (or property) associations; and (b) The modes of explanation change from vitalistic to mechanistic. Whereas young children prefer vitalistic explanations, older children and adults like mechanistic explanations better. We present some experimental findings for these changes. We also indicate how social contexts induce or enhance conceptual change. We discuss three theo-retical issues: implications for conceptual change in biology, for conceptual change in general, and for biology instruction.RésuméLes études récents sur les connaissances intuitives en biologie chez l’enfant montrent que les formes précoces de ces connaissances autonomes subissent des changements qualitatifs par la suite. Cet article est consacré à deux de ces changements: a) les propriétés attribuées à un objet animé et la prédiction de sont comportement font appel chez le jeune enfant à une assimilation objet-personnes, alors que pour les enfants plus âgés et les adultes c’est l’appartenance à des catégories et la liaison catégorie-comportement (ou propriété) qui est déterminante; b) les modes d’explication commencent par être vitalistes pour devenir mécanistes. Des résultats expérimentaux mettant en évidence ces changements sont discutés. L’accent est mis égalements sur le rôle du contexte social dans l’induction ou l’amplification de ces changements conceptuels. Enfin trois perspectives théoriques sont examinées concernant les implications de ces résultats pour le changement conceptuel en biologie, le changement conceptuel quel que soit le domaine et la didactique se la biologie.

Domain-specific constraints of conceptual development

Although we have made much progress in understanding the growth of mind by shifting from Piagetian theory to a variety of views of conceptual development as the domain-specific construction of knowledge under constraints, the key notion of “constraints” is not yet well articulated. As a result, the views have not yet constituted a coherent theory that replaces Piagetian theory. In this article, after summarising “dominant” views of conceptual development, we reconceptualise the notion of “innate constraints”, more specifically as preferences and biases that serve as learning mechanisms, not as innate knowledge or representational contents. We then propose to expand the notion of “constraints” to include interactive, sociocultural constraints as well as internal, cognitive ones, which enable even young children to acquire knowledge in uniquely human ways. We believe that these formulations make the current views of conceptual development better specified and more comprehensive. Finally we offer our prospect for the future of conceptual development theories.

Sociocultural Approaches toCognitive Development: The Constitutions of Culture in Mind

Accessible online at: www.karger.com/journals/hde Until quite recently, most cognitive researchers have concentrated on the study of symbol manipulation within the individual, ignoring the surrounding sociocultural context. As a result, it has often been overlooked that human cognitive competence in daily life is heavily dependent on continuous interaction with other people and ‘mediational means’ or ‘cultural tools’ [Wertsch, 1998]. Furthermore, it is only recently that much attention has been devoted to how this cognitive competence emerges through participating in communities of practice [Nunes, 1999; Scribner, 1986; Saxe, 1991] and how it is often scripted in various forms of ‘guided participation’ [Rogoff, 1990]. The neglect of sociocultural context in cognitive research has resulted in an overemphasis on the universal nature of mind – and not infrequently to an ethnocentric bias of taking salient aspects of mind in modern, western society as universal across time and space. There are some exceptions to this tendency, especially coming from cognitive anthropology [e.g., D’Andrade, 1995], but clearly, we are still struggling to find a way to coordinate the study of individual cognitive processes with the study of sociocultural context. For decades there have been calls to go beyond the isolated individual to attain a better understanding of the human mind [Luria, 1980], and the role of this approach to the role of social and cultural context in cognition can be traced back to much earlier times [Cole, 1996]. However, it is only over the past couple of decades that it has come to occupy a major place in developmental and cognitive research [e.g., Human Development, vol. 39, No. 5, 1996]. The general problem we see in developmental research on cognition is that it has been largely acultural and ahistorical. Although the second wave of the cognitive revolution has given rise to a general recognition that development can be greatly influenced by sociocultural context, the incorporation of cultural variables into mainstream developmental research has been slow. In volume 2 (‘Cognition, Perception and Language’)

The Constitution of General and Specific Mental Models of Other People

This article is about how novices become experts in the domain of piano playing, focusing on how they develop internalized models of other people, a form of culture in the mind. Six novice and nine junior expert college students were individually asked to practice a short piece of music; they were asked to verbalize what they thought during the exercise about the performance they were executing and how they planned to perform it after their practice sessions had been concluded. The novices seemed to have internalized a generalized ‘other’ in their mind, who commanded them to perform accurately and smoothly as goals of the exercise. The junior experts seemed to possess also a model of the audience in their mind, from the perspective of whom they could check and refine their performance. Interviews with two concert class pianists showed that they possessed not only generalized others but also specific others in their mind and could refine their performance based on these models. How experts can be creative in spite of a set of constraints posed by the culture is discussed.

Different neural systems for recognizing plants, animals, and artifacts

The purpose of this study was to investigate functional organization in the human brain involved in the representation of knowledge regarding plants. We measured the brain activity of eight male volunteers during the recognition of visual stimuli representing plants, animals and artifacts, using positron emission tomography. The participants were presented with and were required to name silently two different images each of 15 entities belonging to three ontological categories, and 30 series of four to six digits. Marked increases in regional cerebral blood flow were found in the hippocampus and the parahippocampal areas bilaterally and the right lateral occipital cortex during the silent naming of all three categories, compared with that during the silent reading of digits. The right lateral occipital cortex was specifically activated in association with the naming of plants, and the right fusiform cortex was specifically activated in association with the naming of animals. In addition, the right temporo-occipital cortex was activated only during animals and plants, not artifacts. Our results indicate that there were a few characteristic activations for the different categories, and that entities belonging to the different categories are not necessarily represented in different locations of the brain.

Vocalization latencies of skilled and less skilled comprehenders for words written in hiragana and kanji

Three experiments were conducted to examine whether vocalization latencies for Japanese words would be different between skilled and less skilled Japanese fifth-grade readers. The experimental words were written in hiragana (syllabaries) or kanji (morphograms), two types of scripts in the Japanese writing system. The words consisted of six clusters: (a) real words transcribed in hiragana, involving no special syllables and involving special syllables; (b) pseudowords in hiragana; (c) real words transcribed in kanji, in the language textbook for Grade 2 and for Grade 4; and, (d) pseudowords in kanji. Single-word vocalization latencies were significantly shorter for skilled comprehenders than for less skilled comprehenders in both hiragana and kanji, for all clusters. These results were replicated when pseudowords were excluded (Experiment 2) and when real words and pseudowords were presented in separate subsessions (Experiment 3). The results were consistent with findings for English and suggested that naming speed is a good indicator of the automaticity of the lexical access for both syllabaries and morphograms. Contrary to the previous findings for English, however, the skilled/less skilled differences in vocalization latencies were greater for real words than for pseudowords for both hiragana and kanji. The skilled/less skilled differences in vocalization latencies were greater for real kanji words than for real hiragana words. The applicability of the verbal efficiency theory proposed by Perfetti (1985) across languages and orthographies is discussed. SE REALIZARON tres experimentos para examinar si las latencias de vocalizacion para palabras japonesas diferian entre buenos lectores y lectores con dificultades de quinto grado. Las palabras experimentales estaban escritas en hiragana (silabarios) o kanji (morfogramas), dos tipos de escritura del sistema de escritura del japones. Los itemes consistian en seis palabras con grupos consonanticos: (a) palabras reales transciptas en hiragana con y sin silabas especiales, (b) pseudopalabras en hiragana, (c) palabras reales transcriptas en kanji, en los libros de lectura de 2° y de 4° grado y (d) pseudopalabras en kanji. Las latencias de vocalizacion fueron significativamente mas breves en el caso de los buenos lectores que en el de los lectores con dificultades, tanto en hiragana como en kanji, para todos los grupos consonanticos. Estos resultados fueron replicados cuando se excluyeron las pseudopalabras (Experimento 2) y cuando las palabras reales y las pseudopalabras se presentaron en sesiones diferentes (Experimento 3). Los resultados fueron consistentes con los obtenidos para el ingles y sugieren que la velocidad para nombrar palabras es un buen indicador de la automaticidad del acceso lexico tanto para los silabarios como para los morfogramas. Contrariamente a lo reportado para el ingles, sin embargo, las diferencias en latencias de vocalizacion entre buenos lectores y lectores con dificultades fue mayor para palabras reales que para pseudopalabras, tanto en hiragana como en kanji. Las diferencias en latencias de vocalizacion entre buenos lectores y lectores con dificultades fue mayor para palabras reales en kanji que para palabras reales en hiragana. Se discute la adecuacion para diferentes lenguas y ortografias de la teoria de la eficiencia verbal propuesta por Perfetti (1985). DREI EXPERIMENTE wurden durchgefuhrt, um zu uberprufen, ob begabte und weniger begabte japanische Pflichtschuler der 5. Schulstufe Vokalisationslatenzen bei japanischen Wortern aufweisen. Die experimentellen Begriffe wurden in Hiragana (Silbenschrift) oder Kanji (Bilderschrift) geschrieben, den zwei Formen der japanischen Schreibweise. Der Wortschatz bestand aus 6 Gruppen: (a) reale Worter, transkribiert in Hiragana, sowohl ohne als auch mit besonderen Silbenzeichen; (b) Pseudoausdrucke in Hiragana; (c) reale Worter transkribiert in Kanji aus dem Sprachubungsbuch fur die Stufe 2 und 4; weiters (d) Pseudoworter in Kanji. Die Erfassung der Lautung von einzelnen Wortern war deutlich rascher bei geubten Lesern als bei weniger begabten, sowohl in Hiragani als auch in Kanji, was bei allen Wortgruppen zu beobachten war. Diese Ergebnisse wurden bestatigt, als Pseudoworter ausgelassen wurden (Experiment 2) und als wirkliche Worter und Pseudoworter in eigenen, untergeordneten Lehreinheiten prasentiert wurden (Experiment 3). Die Resultate ergaben sich aus der richtigen Benennung im Englischen und legten nahe, das die Geschwindigkeit in der Erfassung und Benennung der Begriffe ein guter Indikator fur den automatisierten lexikalischen Zugang ist, was sowohl fur Silben als auch fur Morpheme gilt. Im Gegensatz zur vorangegangenen Treffsicherheit in der richtigen Benennung des japanischen Begriffes im Englischen konnte ein eindeutiger Unterschied der Begabten/Unbegabten bei der Vokalisation von realen Kanji-Wortern gegenuber ebensolchen in Hiragana festgestellt werden. Die Anwendung der verbalen Effizienz-These, vorgestellt von Perfetti (1985), und die Querverbindung von Sprache und Orthographie wird ebenso diskutiert.

Might we adopt the learning-related account instead of the talent account?

Although Howe et al.s survey shows little evidence for the talent account, it is premature to conclude that individual differences in achievement can be attributed largely to training and early experience. Moreover, such an empiricist account has problematic social implications, especially in cultures in which effort is emphasized. The aptitude account is thus proposed as a third alternative.

Informal biology is a core domain, but its construction needs experience

Although humans are endowed with domain-specific constraints for acquiring informal biology, its construction requires considerable experience with living things and their cultural representations. Less experienced adults may not know what constitutes generic species, and young children may rely on personification rather than category-based inference. Atrans postulate of the living-kind module that promptly produces universal folk taxonomy does not seem tenable.