Li: Projects
Teaching as a Natural Cognition: Chinese Mothers and their Young Children
Project Period: December, 03-November, 05
Principal Investigator: Sidney Strauss from Tel Aviv University, Co-PI: Jin Li.
Funding Agencies: The Spencer Foundation ($35,000)
Our goal was to investigate how indigenous (less influenced by the West) children (ages 3-8) from rural China develop their natural cognitive ability of teaching and how their mothers engage in teaching their young children household skills. We were interested in children's emergent understanding of other children's minds and their mothers' assumptions about their children's cognitive capacities. We taught each child a novel board game and asked the child to teach a peer. We then asked each child's mother to teach her child a household skill. Both sessions were videotaped. We have transcribed and translated all data. We have also developed our coding schemes and analyzed some data. Our findings show that Chinese rural children are similar to Israeli children with regard to the developing sequence of their teaching cognition. However, differences in the styles of teaching were observed in both the children and their mothers.