Culture and Community

Updated for fall, 2005

Socioeconomic factors in British Columbia (2001)

Adults (over 20) with postsecondary education	50%
Adults with university degree	18%
Adults without high school diploma	17%
Families with income less than $20,000	12%
Adults receiving income assistance	3%
Children receiving income assistance	4%
Teen pregnancies (women 15-17)	2%
Abused children (per 1000)	7

Beyond the statistics

Failing grade won't affect enrollment says East Side elementary principal

This article from the Vancouver Courier reports that Sir William MacDonald elementary school in East Vancouver obtained the lowest ranking in the annual Fraser Institute report card on schools. It describes challenges facing the staff, parents and children of this low SES school.

First Nations Children at Risk

According to a study conducted by the BC Ministry of Education (McBride & McKee, 2001), Aboriginal children have a much greater risk of being identified with severe behaviour disorders (3.5%) than non-aboriginal children (0.8%).

Children are identified with severe behaviour disorders (SBD) on evidence of aggression, violence, ADHD, drug abuse, psychosis, sexually inappropriate behavior, bullying, fire-setting, and other behavior.

The study interviewed school district personnel and Aboriginal community leaders to better understand the reasons why First Nations children are at greater risk, and how schools can respond to reduce that risk.

WHY IS THERE OVER-REPRESENTATION OF ABORIGINAL STUDENTS IN SBD?
Responses across districts were highly consistent. Most common responses included:

Poverty/SES

Family dysfunction – tied to residential school history and lack of parenting skills

Parents with low literacy and numeracy skills

Lack of language models in the home

Higher level of exposure to drug and alcohol use

Witnessing of violence

Lack of role models

Cultural bias in schools

Higher prevalence of FAS/FAE and all that goes with it

Transiency/mobility rates higher than average (especially in urban areas).

Lower expectations/low self-esteem

-- Quoted from BC Ministry of Education Report (McBride & McKee, 2001, p. 41)

The study concluded with recommendations to reduce the risk to aboriginal children:

The most significant finding is that those districts that most closely adhere to what is described in the literature as good educational practice are also those districts that appear to have the most success in the education of Aboriginal learners and the lowest rate of behavioural problems. They tend to:

have open relationships with the Aboriginal community

encourage staff to reach out to the Aboriginal community

have expectations for Aboriginal students that are in keeping with all other students in the system

recognize cultural diversity in the school culture and traditions

use creative and pro-active methods for staffing to include Aboriginal people

emphasize the role of Aboriginal support workers in providing academic and behavioural support as part of the school-based team

create a welcoming environment for parents and children in the school

keep parents informed and involved

identify problem behaviours earlier

conduct careful and thorough assessment of student strengths and needs using a combination of classroom-based criterion-referenced assessment, functional assessment and standardized assessment

have a high degree of precision in describing problem behaviours and developing strategies to address them

develop careful individual plans, review them regularly, and systematically monitor progress

use a team approach to problem-solving

network with community agencies and pro-actively include them in planning for the child

-- Quoted from BC Ministry of Education Report (McBride & McKee, 2001, p. 61)

Sex, Gender and Cognition

Doreen Kimura
Visiting Professor
Department of Psychology
Simon Fraser University

Cognitive differences between males and females have been reliably measured on verbal, spatial, memory and psychomotor tasks.

According to Kimura (1999), males tend to outperform females on spatial orientation, visualization, line orientation, mathematical reasoning, and throwing accuracy.

Tests used in Kimura's research

Kimura has found that females tend to outperform males on object location memory, perceptual speed, verbal memory, numerical calculation, and dexterity.

Nature or nurture?

Hypothesis: Prenatal hormones affect the developing brain to produce the differing patterns of cognitive ability (Kimura, 2002; 1999; 1992).

	Counterpoint: The differences noted by Kimura are due to the social environment (Hyde, 2004; 2000; Hyde & Kling, 2001):
	Practice and experience can increase performance on all ability tests on which gender differences have been measured. Gender differences have been decreasing in many areas of human achievement as the culture changes. Gender differences favoring males in math achievement are small and decreasing.

Janet S. Hyde
Professor
Psychology and Women's Studies
University of Wisconsin

Gender and School Achievement in British Columbia

In all academic subjects, female students attain higher average school grades at graduation. The provincial exam scores, shown here for 1998-1999, give a somewhat different picture.

Female participation in computer technology courses has declined markedly in university level programs.

Bilingualism and Cognition

More than half the worlds population is bilingual. What are the effects of bilingualism on cognition and learning?

Advantages of bilingualism

Ellen Bialystok
Distinguished Research Professor
Department of Psychology
York University

Hypothesis: Continual management of two or more languages strengthens cognitive attentional control functions (Bialystok, 2001).

Bialystok et al. (2004) observed middle aged and elderly monolinguals and bilinguals on the Simon task. The Simon task measures reaction time to visual stimuli. Bilinguals performed better than monolinguals and the bilingual advantage was greater among older participants.
Bialystok (1999) found that bilingual children performed better than monolingual children on a visual card sorting task.

Hypothesis: Bilingualism enhances childrens' metalinguistic development (Vygotsky, 1962).

Bilingualism appears not to offer substantial advantage in childrens' phonological awareness (Bialystok, Majumder & Martin, 2003). Phonological awareness, including the ability to segment phonemes, is important in early literacy.
Bilingual children perform better on verbal tasks requiring a high degree of attentional control (Bialystok, 1999). For example, there is no advantage for bilingual children in determining whether sentences like "Why is the dog barking so loudly?" and "Why the dog is barking so loudly?" are grammatical. But they do have an advantage in determining whether sentences like "Why is the cat barking so loudly?" are grammatical because they are better able to focus attention on the relevant information.

	According to a recent study, bilingualism changes the anatomy of the brain. People that speak two languages have more "grey matter" in the language area of the brain.
	-- from Reuters, October 13, 2004

Disadvantages of Bilingualism

	"The early American literature on bilingualism pointed to its negative consequences.... Most of the studies administered IQ tests to immigrant students, and found the bilingual children to have lower scores than native English monolinguals....Critics of this work pointed out that many of these students were probably not bilingual at all, and were handicapped in taking the test because they were not proficient in English. More recent research that has selected subjects carefully, such as choosing only balanced bilinguals, have shown advantages for bilinguals on a variety of verbal and non-verbal tasks.... In general, negative findings tend to appear when bilingualism is a characteristic of low social status, and thus it is more properly understood through sociological rather than psychological analysis."
	-- Kenji Hakuta (2000)

A possible but unproven disadvantage for children growing up in some bilingual environments is insufficient language input in either language to develop high levels of competence in either language. This hypothesis is difficult to evaluate because bilingualism is often confounded by SES and other non-linguistic factors.

References

Bialystok, E. (2001). Bilingualism in development: Language, literacy, and cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Bialystok , E. (1999). Cognitive complexity and attentional control in the bilingual mind. Child Development, 70, 636-644 .

Bialystok, E., Craik, F. I. M., Klein, R., & Viswanathan, M. (2004). Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: Evidence from the simon task. Psychology and Aging, 19, 290–303.

Bialystok, E., Majumder, S., & Martin, M. M. (2003). Developing phonological awareness: Is there a bilingual advantage? Applied Psycholinguistics, 24, 27-44.

Hakuta, K. (2000). Bilingualism. In A. E. Kazdin (Ed.) Encyclopedia of Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kimura, D. (2002). Sex hormones influence human cognitive pattern. Neuroendocrinology Letters, 23, 67–77.

Kimura, D. (1999). Sex and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Kimura, D. (1992) Sex differences in the brain. Scientific American, 267(3), 118-125.

Hyde, J. S. (2000). Sex and Cognition - Review. Journal of Sex Research

Hyde, J. S. (2004). Half the human experience: The psychology of women. Boston, MA: Houghton-Mifflin.

Hyde, J. S., & Kling, K. C. (2001). Women, motivation, and achievement.Psychology of Women Quarterly, 25, 364-378.

McBride, S. R., & McKee, W. (2001). Overrepresentation of aboriginal children reported with behavioral disorders. Report to the British Columbia Ministry of Education. Retrieved October 6, 2004 from http://www.bced.gov.bc.ca/abed/abed_over.pdf

Vygotsky, L. S. (1962). Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.