Vernacular Test Instructions in Relation to Cognitive Task Behaviour Among Highland Children of Papua New Guinea

Abstract

Summary. Analysis of results of tests of cognitive development in Papua New Guinea children indicated that membership of different language/culture groups was an important source of variance. Three groups each of 48 children were selected from one language culture group and equated for age and sex. Two groups weremade up of school children, equated for school experience; the third group had no school experience. One group of school children was tested in English, the language of the school; the other two groups were tested in the vernacular common to all three groups. Three tasks were used: an equivalence grouping of pictures, a class inclusion test, and conservation of length. All three tests were chosen because there were language differences between English and the vernacular in labelling the components of the task. Significant differences were found between the groups in their performance on the tasks. These differences were related both to amount of school experience and language of testing but the latter was, by far, the more significant.

Conservation in Community School Children in Papua new Guinea

“…Data on length and quantity conservation tend t o support Kelly and Philp's (1975) data in that the Jimi children, culturally similar to the Melpas, conserve these qualities t o a similar level. Since care was taken t o obtain a large sample of Jimi children from several schools, the data presented here could well be used as a basis for examining more systernatically the possibility of cross-cultural differences occurring within PNG.…”

“…Overall 40% of children conserved. This is considerably below the figure cited by Kelly and Philp ( 1975) with a Melpa group of comparable age range though above the figures for Avatip and Kunimaipa children.…”

“…A small group of Melpa high school students ( N = 30) were tested for conservation of area. Since only 46% were successful, though these children were a highly selected group (only about 40% of community school children are admitted t o high school), and since Kelly and Philp's ( 1975) Melpa children generally performed better than the Jimi children referred to here, it seems likely that a majority of Jimi children would not conserve area until some years after the age of 14.…”

Trades students and trade calculations: Stupid or stupefied?

“…One of us had been engaged in work related to this problem with a more general subject group and had obtained results which indicated that there appeared to be a connection between the modes of representing reality as hypothesized by Bruner et al (1967) and cognitive structures as inferred by Piaget (Phiip and Kelly, 1974;Kelly and Philp, 1975). From this work it seemed that it might be possible to throw light on the above problem by examining the success rate of the criterion groups in the classification/superordination of material when presented in ways which favoured, or made possible, coding the information according to differing ways of representing reality.…”

The Concept of Educational Disadvantage and Some Implications for the Classroom Teacher

“…(Cole and Bruner, 1972) The difficulty is that in some cultural contexts, relevant transferable skills may not exist or, more commonly, linguistic structures may not be appropriate, especially when school instruction is not in the mother-tongue or mother-dialect. For example, among the Melpa people of the Western Highlands of Papua New Guinea, complex linguistic hierarchies of classification do not exist (Kelly and Philp, 1975). The languages are functionally appropriate entirely to the society and the culture, but are not functionally appropriate to the learning situation of the school.…”