Cultural Differences in Children's Teaching Strategies

• In Event: 16.024 - Learning From and Teaching Others: Individual Differences in Strategies Preschoolers Use to Learn and Teach

Abstract

How children teach others can be influenced by their own experiences as learners in their cultural context (Maynard, 2004; Vygotsky, 1978), and may reflect the unique pedagogical beliefs and practices in different cultures. In this study, we explore the cultural differences in children’s teaching strategies in the US and China.
Studies on pedagogical and parental beliefs in China and the US suggests that Chinese caregivers and teachers emphasize knowledge mastery and performance (Paine, 1990), whereas US caregivers and teachers emphasize play (Pang & Richey, 2007; Tobin & Hsueh, 2011). Such literature plausibly offers the hypothesis that Chinese preschoolers might develop more sophisticated teaching earlier than US children due to their exposure to more formal instruction. However, the varied teaching practices in the two countries may offer an opposite hypothesis. Traditional Chinese teachers give lectures to children as a group in preschools, seldom providing one-on-one instruction. By contrast, the play-oriented and child-centered classrooms in the US might offer opportunities for more tailored instruction (Pang & Richey 2007). This tailored teaching experience might suggest that US preschoolers may develop more sophisticated teaching earlier than Chinese preschoolers.
To test these hypotheses, we first taught American (N=51) and Chinese (N=49) preschoolers a simple game: red but not black pieces had to be placed inside a red square. We introduced preschoolers to three puppets: one puppet played the game perfectly, another made one mistake, and a third made two mistakes. We asked children to rate how much each puppet understood about the game immediately after observing each puppet play, and then asked children to teach the puppets. Children then completed a Theory of Mind (ToM) battery.
We found that with age, children in both the US and China became increasingly sophisticated and responsive teachers. In both countries, older children used more verbal teaching strategy than younger children, F(1, 97) = 8.70, p < 0.01, η2p = 0.08., However, older (6-year-old) US children used more sophisticated teaching strategies than older Chinese children, i.e. older US children were more likely to teach contingently and address the puppets’ mistakes during instruction (e.g. “You have to put the red one in the square, instead of the black piece”) (p <0.05). For US children, more sophisticated teaching was significantly predicted by both the understanding of false belief (β = 0.368, t = 2.85, p < 0.01), and the ability to infer learners’ knowledge based on mistakes (β = 0.276, t = 2.06, p < 0.05), after controlling for age. No such relation was found with Chinese children. Based on the past literature, we suspect that the varying teaching practice in the US and China may have led to a different emphasis on the importance of ToM in the learning and teaching process. ToM may play an important role in children’s teaching in the US, but in China, the learning process may benefit more from ToM since children need to monitor their own learning process during a unified lecture, and ask for teachers’ help after class.

Authors

• Yixin Kelly Cui, Boston University

• Samuel Ronfard, Boston University

• Kathleen H. Corriveau, Boston University