Douglas Lee Medin - US grants

The research analyzes the interaction of knowledge, behaviors and values in environmental decision making. Data are collected from two sites where Native American and majority culture populations share a habitat but conflict over resource use: the Wolf River area of Wisconsin and the Lowland Maya forest region of Guatemala. Studies integrate formal modeling techniques from psychology, anthropology and sociology to show that: (1) people share cultural models of the environment to a surprisingly detailed degree; (2) these mental models inform and predict actual behaviors, with measurable ecological consequences; and (3) individual and cultural differences in models are motivated by different patterns of resource valuation. Research findings are expected to establish: (4) a first approximation of ecological cognition across cultures, (5) a cognitive dimension to stimulate new research on how people decide to manage common resources; and (6) a comprehensive basis for conflict-resolution negotiation that involves understanding the relations between environmental cognitions, behaviors and values.

This project will study children's acquisition knowledge in the domain of biology. The goal is to understand better what biological knowledge children bring to the classroom and how this knowledge is organized to support reasoning and explanation. Although children's understanding of biology has been examined in quite a few studies, little attention has been directed at the question of how biological knowledge might vary in children being raised in different cultural settings and among adults with different levels of experience. Since the existing work in the area suggests that adult conceptions of biological kinds and ecological relationships varies with culture and experience, children's understandings of nature likely also varies with culture and experience. Identifying cross-cultural differences and commonalities in biological knowledge is important if we are to meet the educational goals of the 21st century. It is also important to build theories that reflect accurately the diversity in knowledge and experience of people around the world. The project will include a number of under-studied populations, including urban and rural majority culture children, urban Mexican immigrant children, rural Native American children, rural Yukatek Maya and Ladino children. Children and adults will be given a variety of tasks to probe their underlying biological concepts (e.g. "alive"), processes, and relationships. In addition, the research will examine parent-child dyads and other sources of information that help to shape children's conceptions of biology. The research will test specific theories about which aspects of biological knowledge are likely to be universal, which aspects vary with culture and experience, and how these variations interact with formal instruction. This research is directly relevant to science education. It is important to engage the understandings that children bring to the classroom in order to build on their real world experience and to address misconceptions when they arise. To ignore real world experience would risk failure to understand the educational possibilities for learning about science in general, and biology in particular.

This project is a collaborative effort between Northwestern University, TERC, the Menominee Tribal School (MTS) and the American Indian Center of Chicago (AIC). The long-term goal of the proposed project is to improve science learning and school achievement for Native-American children. They begin school with an advanced understanding of biology and superior performance on standardized tests compared to their non-Native peers, but in later years this benefit does not result in high levels of school achievement and biology becomes their worst subject. Understanding why and how this happens is a central purpose of this research. Previous work examined the hypothesis that there is discord between Native-American cultural ways of knowing biology and the cultural ways of knowing in school science and that this discord is at the heart of student disengagement and underachievement. A central feature of the discord was found to be the lack of explicit connections across contexts in which students learn science. The lack of connections is manifest across a range of levels, including content knowledge, practices, values, and relevance to family, community, and society at large. The project is composed of two complementary strands of work aimed at supporting students? navigation between and through the various cultural contexts in which they learn science. One strand consists of design experiments in both in-school and out-of-school settings that will allow the researchers to continue to develop, extend, and refine design principles and related curricular innovations. The second strand consists of a series of small-scale cognitive studies that are intended to support components of the design work. Further, this project will contribute to the growing body of work exploring the deep intellectual resources students from non-dominant backgrounds bring to teaching and learning environments and the ways in which these resources can enhance school science learning. Previous work demonstrates that culturally- and community-based science programs can affect identification with science, motivation to learn science and conceptions of the very nature of science. The proposers of this project are anxious to develop and test the framework further and to implement their design principles in classrooms and after-school programs.

How do language, culture and experience influence children's developing understanding of the natural world in general and of biological concepts in particular? The PIs address these questions through cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and developmental studies. Previous research has been based mainly on children from middle-class, urban, technologically advanced populations. This narrow empirical base limits our ability to determine whether any of the biological concepts held by children are universal, and how children's early concepts are shaped by the linguistic and cultural communities in which they are immersed. With previous NSF funding, the PIs launched a comprehensive investigation of biological knowledge and reasoning in young children and adults from a range of cultural and linguistic communities (e.g. Indonesian, Yukatek Maya), communities that also varied in the richness of their direct experiences with nature (urban, rural European-American, rural Native-American). Cross-linguistic developmental studies established that language affects the development of basic concepts such as "alive." The present project will broaden our base of languages (Polish, Bulgarian, Turkish) to pursue linguistic influences in the development of biological concepts. Recent evidence from the investigators suggests that, in contrast to previous theorizing, a human-centered biology is neither an inevitable stage of development nor an automatic result of impoverished experience with plants and animals. Instead it appears that an anthropocentric biology is a learned cultural model. The goal for the current proposal is to deepen our understanding of cultural models for relating to nature and to explore their role in the development of children's understanding of biology. The investigators will use a variety of measurements and learning and reasoning tasks to examine how children integrate and coordinate different sources of knowledge and cultural models (e.g. discourse with parents, books, Disney movies, Discovery channel) related to nature.

This proposal represents basic science, but it also is relevant to a number of national and practical goals. By sharpening our understanding of what biological knowledge young children from various cultural groups (urban and rural Native-American as well as U.S. majority culture) bring to their U.S. classrooms, we should be able to improve science instruction. The diversity of our study populations allows us to determine which patterns of development have broad generality and, where we observe variation, to understand how cultural practices shape understandings of biology. The studies of the role of language may also suggest strategies for reducing the confusion between everyday uses of biological kind terms (e.g. "alive") and concepts needed in school (e.g. "living thing"). No less important, the research will make significant strides to increase the diversity of the populations being studied and the researchers studying them, reinforce research partnerships, and foster research infrastructure as a means of empowering tribal institutions in the domain of scientific research, educational policy and educational practice.

The objective of this project is to examine the role of culture in the development of children's knowledge of and reasoning about the natural world. This project builds on previous work that found cultural differences in science-related practices such as observation, hypothesis formation, and explanation. It also extends design research to preschool contexts with both Native and European-American children, with the goal of finding ways to design rigorous science learning environments for young children. The study populations include both urban and rural Native-American and (mainly) European-American children. The studies include adults and children of different ages, with tasks tailored to each sample. This will achieve a more comprehensive view of the development of understandings of nature. The project is a collaborative effort between TERC, the American Indian Center of Chicago, the Menominee Tribe of Wisconsin, and Northwestern University. The overall goal is to improve science learning by bringing informal, out-of-school learning to bear on more formal, school-based science learning.

The project employs an integration of multiple methods and measures to conduct three sets of studies. 1. Studies of input conditions and learning in everyday contexts. 2. More formal cognitive science studies of children's learning and conceptual organization. 3. Community-based design experiments focused on science learning. In different ways, each of these methods allows the project to further develop, test, and examine the educational implications of proposed theories of how culture affects science learning. This research project offers extensive cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary research opportunities for pre- and post-doctoral research trainees. Members of Native American communities have increasingly become involved on related project as PIs, research assistants, and graduate fellows. An important aspect of this project is resource development and capacity building in Native-American institutions.

This research should have strong impacts on theories of cognitive and conceptual development, especially those pertaining to how children's and adults' existing knowledge is shaped by culture and experience. It should also promote an expansive view of cultural practices, including contact with the natural world, community forms of engagement, and parent-child interactions. The project develops classroom practices that, if successful, have excellent potential for scaling up and generality. Moreover, this project will provide a deeper understanding of the developmental processes underlying cross-cultural similarities and differences in science learning. This will serve as an essential resource in national and local efforts to advance the education of children enrolled in US schools, including the increasing number of children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

This project is an empirical research study using a resiliency-based framework to investigate the factors that contribute to American Indian and Alaska Native (AI-AN) success and achievement in STEM education and careers. The focus is on what makes people successful rather than what makes them fail. It was developed through a partnership between the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES), the Office for Community Health (OCH) at the University of New Mexico (UNM), and Northwestern University. The project is also interdisciplinary, partnering researchers from Anthropology, Psychology and Economics/Public Health with AISES to contribute a unique perspective on Native participation in STEM. The aim of this research is to identify the role of culture, individual identity, epistemology and bi-cultural efficacy in this process. The guiding hypothesis is that AI-AN success in STEM is influenced by dynamics of culture, epistemology and individual identity, with the role of bi-cultural efficacy being particularly significant. The researchers are interested in knowing: (a) What factors positively influence AI-AN success in STEM?; (b) What role do the dynamics of culture, epistemology and individual identity play in AI-AN success in STEM and how are these dynamics played-out in individual experience?; and (c) Does bi-cultural efficacy play a role in this process, and if so, what is that role?

The proposed collaboration uses a mixed methods design, beginning with an ethnographic approach that will build on advances in knowledge from the extensive literature on deficits and barriers, and nascent research on epistemology, adding new empirical data. The research consciously privileges voices of Native scholars whose experience is not well represented in mainstream perspectives or taken into consideration by policy makers. Adaptive project design through iterative data collection and analysis with synthesis and incorporation of findings from different components ongoing throughout the study will allow for dynamic inclusion of participant input. The study includes four separate but integrated research components: (1) 75 in-depth ethnographic interviews with 25 AI-AN STEM professionals and AISES members, conducted in three iterative sets of 25 each; (2) Three AI-AN undergraduate Student Research Scientists (SRS) from UNM will be mentored in the conduct of 36 peer interviews (12 each) with other AI-AN students; (3) Secondary analysis of unique AISES organizational archive with 35 years of information on more than 6000+ AI-AN involved in STEM; and (4) a preliminary survey will be conducted in year three of the project with 25 AISES members to validate measures of bi-cultural efficacy that contribute to AI-AN success in STEM. The Principal Investigators will mentor Native scholars to develop protocols, collect and analyze data, present findings, and participate as members of the Research Team. A Project Summit in Year Three will disseminate project findings to a broad group of AISES stakeholders. This project will also structure a new role for AISES to play in the STEM community by leveraging the unique position of AISES as a national AI-AN STEM organization and developing data collection protocols and data collection tools the organization can continue to use for research in the future.

Results of this research will increase understanding of how AI-AN individuals leverage personal and cultural assets in a way that embraces a congruency between Indigenous culture (Native science) and Western science as they achieve success in STEM. This information will contribute to the literature analyzing issues in AI-AN education and under-representation in STEM and indicate directions for future research. Most importantly, this research may lay the foundation for increasing the proportion of AI-AN scientists. Factors that contribute to success and achievement of AI-AN in STEM are often unrecognized, underappreciated or poorly understood. The improved coherence of interventions that will result from better conceptualization of the strengths and needs of AI-AN students will provide a roadmap for developing best-practice and model-driven programming within universities, improve AI-AN educational outcomes in STEM, and in turn, contribute to improvements in AI-AN individual and community well-being.

Most experimental studies in the behavioral sciences rely on college students as participants for reasons of convenience, and most take place in North America and Europe. As a result, studies are only sampling from a narrow range of human experiences. The results of these studies have limited generalizability, failing to reflect the full range of mental and behavioral phenomena across diverse cultures and backgrounds. However sampling from broader populations is challenging, due to limited opportunities and access, heightened cost, and the need for specific knowledge about how to adapt research protocols to different communities. The goal of this workshop is to develop some tools and guidelines to help researchers overcome barriers to broader sampling, and to incentivize doing so through better institutional support.

The goal of this workshop is to develop tools to support and encourage increased robustness and generalizability in the experimental behavioral sciences. The meeting is dedicated to identifying and developing potential solutions to the so-called "WEIRD people" problem: the fact that most experimental behavioral science research is conducted with members of WEIRD populations (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich Democracies). The discovery that much of this research fails to generalize to broader populations and fails to capture the range of human patterned variation in thought and behavior creates a pressing need for research approaches to be more inclusive. Although there are researchers throughout the world who have developed effective models for overcoming these limitations, there are significant barriers to achieving robust and generalizable experimental behavioral research for most researchers. This workshop will bring together scholars from a range of disciplines whose research represents positive case studies of how to overcome these barriers. The participants aspire to accomplish three goals: 1) develop tools and training materials to help researchers enhance diversity in their research populations, 2) develop infrastructure solutions for connecting researchers across diverse contexts and populations, and 3) develop a set of recommendations for institutional changes to support enhancing diversity in experimental behavioral science through manuscript, grant, and tenure review.

As part of its overall strategy to enhance learning in informal environments, the Advancing Informal STEM Learning (AISL) program funds innovative research, approaches and resources for use in a variety of settings. The project will conduct research designed to deepen our fundamental knowledge about culture, experience, and ecosystems cognition and to develop innovative practices and approaches to support learning about changing ecological systems and environmental decision making. Work on cultural differences in the production of complex systems knowledge is severely lacking. This gap in knowledge may contribute to the continued reproduction of inequities in science education. More broadly findings from this project will have clear implications for theories of cognitive development, especially those pertaining to how knowledge is shaped by culture and experience. Focusing on ecosystems may represent an opportunity to not only increase engagement and achievement in science among non-dominant communities and Native youth specifically, but also advance effective learning for all communities. The primary deliverables for the project are conference presentations and research publications. However, the project will also develop additional resources freely available to researchers, educators, and the general public. These will include summer curricular materials and teaching tools, professional development workshops, practitioner briefs about research findings that can be used in professional development workshops and shared share more broadly, and evaluation reports.

A deeper understanding of cultural influences on conceptions of the natural world can serve to advance the educational needs of children, including children from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. Project research will include two interrelated series of studies designed to expand knowledge about human cognition of complex ecosystems and the affordances of informal STEM learning environments in developing and supporting the critical 21st century skill of ecological systems level reasoning. The first consists of a series of experiments focused on ecological cognition and the role of humans in nature. The second consists of design-based research interventions in informal settings, summer workshops for youth and the communities, focused on ecological systems level thinking and socio-environmental decision making. The project will recruit and engage both child and adult participants from two broad cultural communities, Native Americans and European Americans living in urban and suburban communities, in part because it affords a sharp test of human-nature relations. Sampling from two different urban communities will avoid simple Native-non-Native comparative binaries and to conduct Native-to-Native comparative analysis. Based on results from this, the project will result in: 1) foundational knowledge about human learning and reasoning and ecosystems and environmental decision making, 2) culturally responsive models of learning and practice about complex ecosystems for indoors and outdoors informal learning environments, and 3) insights about research-practice-community partnerships. One important objective of the research is to broaden participation and close opportunity gaps for under-represented groups in STEM fields broadly and more specifically for Indigenous people. Members of Indigenous communities, who provide strong role models for other aspiring scholars, will be involved as postdoctoral fellows, research assistants and graduate fellows.