As two students passed each other in the office doorway, they jostled a sign hanging on the handle, sending its message swinging. "Have you heard," it read. "I’m busy right now. Go away."
But Jin Li, assistant professor of education and human development, was not sending anyone from her office — not even those who stopped by, recognized the hectic pace of work in progress, and offered to return later.
"It’s always like this," said Li. Her research into the differences in the concept of learning between Chinese and American preschoolers means her office is often crammed with students analyzing data and peppering her with questions in both languages.
Li directed instructions to one student about the work before assuring all of the students that they knew what they were doing and would not need to ask her any questions for the next hour.
And, Li added, to demonstrate her confidence in her own statement, she would even leave the building during that time.
Sixteen years ago Li came to the United States from China with the goal of teaching German at the college level. But when she and her husband settled in Burlington, Vt., she registered as a substitute teacher, a decision that ultimately changed her career focus.
Called one morning to teach high school English, Li argued with the administrator on the phone that she was unqualified for the job. "Stop arguing," said her husband. "They don’t want you to teach English, they want you to baby-sit."
Li accepted the assignment and others like it and eventually came to understand what her husband meant. She saw a lack of interest in learning among some students. "It was very different from what I grew up with."
After receiving her master’s in foreign language education from the University of Pittsburgh, and a master’s of education in administrative planning and social policy from Harvard University, Li began to think more about how children from various cultures develop different thoughts about learning.
Four years ago, she earned her doctorate in human development at Harvard, writing her thesis on the Chinese "Heart and Mind for Wanting to Learn."
Although all children are endowed with the capacities to learn and most of them go to school, their understanding of learning may differ substantially due to cultural priorities and values, she said.
Li has found that preschoolers in both the United States and China have positive feelings about learning. By the time they are 5, it appears children have developed sophisticated thoughts and feelings about learning and are skilled at articulating them.
American children seem to think of learning as a fine-grained mental process and the mind as a neutral machine, said Li. That Western model is somewhat consistent with the ancient Greek understanding of the mind, and learning as the desire to discover and explore the world.
On the other hand, there is a moral dimension to the way Chinese think about learning — as a pathway and a self-cultivation process that is morally right, said Li, whose paper on the Chinese conceptualization of learning is slated to appear in the journal Ethos.
So what happens to some American students by the time they reach high school and have an attitude that caused her husband to refer to her substitute teaching assignments as "baby-sitting"?
While a lot of American students, such as those enrolled at highly competitive universities, have very positive attitudes about learning, a lot of children get "turned off" to learning along the way through school, according to Li.
Much research has been done on the differences in outcomes for American and Chinese children based on test scores, but that is the end result of the learning process.
By spanning her research from preschoolers through adults, Li will be able to provide a sense of how the process develops over time, said Cynthia Garcia Coll, professor of education, psychology and pediatrics, chair of the Department of Education, and director of the Center for the Study of Human Development.
"Lately there is this question of why Asians in general are doing so much better," Garcia Coll said. "She is unraveling that by going deeply into the two cultures."
The mechanics of learning, such as comparing the number of hours spent in school, are not within Li’s focus. More telling, Li thinks, is the early formation of children’s ideas about learning and how those may affect their outcomes.
"For any school, for any teacher, they need to know what the kids are thinking," said Li.
"It’s this long engagement — the learning process — that is not well understood."
Before leaving behind her crew of students in her office, Li instructed them to direct their analysis at that moment to "the cow" scenario.
"The cow" is one of Li’s experiments in which there are a series of pictures. Children are asked to tell which picture they prefer and give a reason. The pictures depict a cow that, upon seeing a book on the ground, decides either to play with a ball or read the book.
Thirty-one percent of U.S. children and 60 percent of Chinese children chose the book, according to initial findings Li presented at the biennial conference of the Society of Research in Child Development in April.
Although a smaller number of U.S. children chose the book, a greater proportion of them expressed positive affect and value expressions regarding books and reading than their Chinese peers, she said in her presentation.
Ultimately, Li thinks, there are benefits to the way people think about learning that can be derived from both cultures.
