An official website of the United States government
Abstract Young children and adolescents in subsistence societies forage for a wide range of resources. They often target child‐specific foods, they can be very successful foragers, and they share their produce widely within and outside of their nuclear family. At the same time, while foraging, they face risky situations and are exposed to diseases that can influence their immune development. However, children's foraging has largely been explained in light of their future (adult) behavior. Here, we reinterpret findings from human behavioral ecology, evolutionary medicine and cultural evolution to center foraging children's contributions to life history evolution, community resilience and immune development. We highlight the need to foreground immediate alongside delayed benefits and costs of foraging, including inclusive fitness benefits, when discussing children's food production from an evolutionary perspective. We conclude by recommending that researchers carefully consider children's social and ecological context, develop cross‐cultural perspectives, and incorporate children's foraging into Indigenous sovereignty discourse.
more »
« less
I copy you as I believe you know about our culture: Combining imitation and selective trust literatures
Abstract Empirical findings and theorizations of both imitation and selective trust offer different views on and interpretations of children's social learning mechanisms. The imitation literature provides ample documentation of children's behavioural patterns in the acquisition of socially appropriate norms and practices. The selective trust literature provides insights into children's cognitive processes of choosing credible informants and what information to learn in future interactions. In this paper, we place together findings from both fields and note that they share analogically similar theoretical underpinnings and offer explanations that are complementary to each other. We contend that children's imitative tendency may be due to their selection of in‐group members ascultural experts, who serve as reliable sources of conventional information. Moving forward, we note the importance of evaluating individual differences and cultural factors to provide a more holistic understanding of universality and variation in children's social learning mechanisms.
more »
« less
- Award ID(s):
- 1652224
- PAR ID:
- 10438415
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley Blackwell (John Wiley & Sons)
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Infant and Child Development
- Volume:
- 32
- Issue:
- 5
- ISSN:
- 1522-7227
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
More Like this
-
-
Abstract BackgroundActive learning, on average, increases student performance in STEM courses. Yet, there is also large variation in the effectiveness of these implementations. A consistent goal of active learning is moving students towards becoming active constructors of their knowledge. This emphasis means student engagement is of central importance. Thus, variation in student engagement could help explain variation in outcomes from active learning. In this study, we employ Pekrun’s Control–Value Theory to examine the impact of four aspects of course social and cultural environments on student engagement. This theory posits that social and cultural features of the course environment influence students’ appraisals of their ability to control their academic outcomes from the course and the value they see in those outcomes. Control and value in turn influence the emotions students experience in the course and their behaviors. We selected four features of the course environment suggested in the literature to be important in active learning courses: course goal structure, relevance of course content, students’ trust in their instructor, and perceived course competition. ResultsWe surveyed students in 13 introductory STEM courses. We used structural equation modeling to map how features of the course environment related to control, value, and academic emotions, as well as how control, value, and academic emotions influenced engagement. We found engagement was positively related to control and value as well as the emotion of curiosity. Engagement was negatively related to the emotion of boredom. Importantly, features of the course environment influenced these four variables. All features influenced control: goal structure, relevance, and instructor trust increased it, while competition decreased it. All features except competition were related positively to value. Relevance and instructor trust increased curiosity. Goal structure, relevance, and instructor trust all reduced boredom, while competition increased it. ConclusionOverall, our study suggests that the way instructors structure the social and cultural environment in active learning courses can impact engagement. Building positive instructor–student relationships, reducing course competition, emphasizing mastery and the relevance of the course to students can all increase engagement in course activities.more » « less
-
Triberti, Stefano (Ed.)Differences in national responses to COVID-19 have been associated with the cultural value of collectivism. The present research builds on these findings by examining the relationship between collectivism at the individual level and adherence to public health recommendations to combat COVID-19 during the pre-vaccination stage of the pandemic, and examines different characteristics of collectivism (i.e., concern for community, trust in institutions, perceived social norms) as potential psychological mechanisms that could explain greater compliance. A study with a cross-section of American participants (N= 530) examined the relationship between collectivism and opting-in to digital contact tracing (DCT) and wearing face coverings in the general population. More collectivistic individuals were more likely to comply with public health interventions than less collectivistic individuals. While collectivism was positively associated with the three potential psychological mechanisms, only perceived social norms about the proportion of people performing the public health interventions explained the relationship between collectivism and compliance with both public health interventions. This research identifies specific pathways by which collectivism can lead to compliance with community-benefiting public health behaviors to combat contagious diseases and highlights the role of cultural orientation in shaping individuals’ decisions that involve a tension between individual cost and community benefit.more » « less
-
Abstract This study examines how parents' and children's explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors support children's causal reasoning at a museum in San Jose, CA in 2017. One‐hundred‐nine parent–child dyads (3–6 years; 56 girls, 53 boys; 32 White, 9 Latino/Hispanic, 17 Asian‐American, 17 South Asian, 1 Pacific Islander, 26 mixed ethnicity, 7 unreported) played at an air flow exhibit with a nonobvious causal mechanism. Children's causal reasoning was probed afterward. The timing of parents' explanatory talk and exploratory behaviors was related to children's systematic exploration during play. Children's exploratory behavior, and parents' goal setting during play, were related to children's subsequent causal reasoning. These findings support the hypothesis that children's exploration is related to both internal learning processes and external social scaffolding.more » « less
-
Sacristán, A.; Cortés-Zavala, J. & (Ed.)Programmatic collaborations involving mathematicians and educators in the U.S. have been valuable but complex (e.g., Heaton & Lewis, 2011; Bass, 2005; Bass & Ball, 2014). Sultan & Artzt (2005) offer necessary conditions (p.53) including trust and helpfulness. Articles in Fried & Dreyfus (2014) and Bay-Williams (2012) describe outcomes from similarly collaborative efforts; however, there is a gap in the literature in attending to how race and gender intersect with issues of professional status, culture, and standards of practice. Arbaugh, McGraw and Peterson (2020) contend that “the fields of mathematics education and mathematics need to learn how to learn from each other - to come together to build a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts” (p. 155). Further, they posit that the two must “learn to honor and draw upon expertise related to both similarities and differences” across disciplines, or cultures. We argue that in order to do this, we must also take into account race, gender, language. For example, words like trust or helpfulness can read very differently when viewed from personal and professional culture, gender, or racial lenses. This poster shares personal vignettes from the perspective of three collaborators – one black male mathematician, one white female mathematics educator, and one white woman who was trained as a mathematician but works as a mathematics educator - illustrating some of the complexity of collaboration.more » « less
