Cultural contexts and mathematical practices: A study of schoolchildren, newspaper vendors and cigarette sellers in Delhi.
Item
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Title
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Cultural contexts and mathematical practices: A study of schoolchildren, newspaper vendors and cigarette sellers in Delhi.
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Identifier
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AAI9510676
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identifier
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9510676
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Creator
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Khan, Farida Abdulla.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Joseph Glick
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Date
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1994
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Psychology, Developmental | Psychology, General | Education, Educational Psychology
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Abstract
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This study was an attempt to discover the relationship of cultural contexts and mathematical practices of children in three different activities which require some amount of mathematical competence. Subjects were school children, cigarette sellers and newspaper vendors and the practices within which their mathematical practices are defined were the activities of schooling, cigarette selling and newspaper vending.;The first phase of the study consisted of detailed ethnographic observations of the activities, which was followed by a series of mathematical tasks. Subjects were assessed on their ability to count, their familiarity with the conventional orthographic representation of numbers and their knowledge of math facts.;Addition, subtraction, multiplication and division word problems on two levels of familiarity were administered to all three groups and performance was analyzed in terms of accuracy, strategies used and the types of errors committed. Significant main effects were observed for groups, operations and levels of familiarity. Results indicated that across operations and familiarity levels the cigarette sellers' accuracy levels were significantly higher than those of the school children and the newspaper vendors. Differences between the newspaper vendors and school children varied with operations and within the familiarity levels.;The newspaper vendors performed significantly better on the familiar problems as compared to the unfamiliar problems, whereas accuracy levels for both the school children as well as the cigarette sellers showed no significant differences for familiarity levels.;The two vending groups displayed marked similarities in using oral non-school strategies in contrast to the school group, which depended largely on written and school-algorithmic procedures. Consequently errors for the school group stemmed largely from their inadequate use of these algorithms, or the inability either to find the right procedure, or, having found it, to apply it correctly. Errors for the cigarette sellers were largely computational with some inability in working with large numbers orally. This inability of handling large numbers orally was also the major source of errors for the newspaper vendors.;The performance of the three groups was also compared on word problems using combined operations, profit and loss problems and a proportions problem and the performance of the two vending groups was better than that of the school children.;The results are taken as confirmation of the importance of locating practices and practicing individuals within the contexts in which they are functioning. The practice of schooling is revealed as an activity situated within "modes of thinking and ways of speaking" just as much as the practice of cigarette selling or newspaper vending is. The ways in which Vygotsky's socio-historical theory encourages investigations of the world of practices was explored as a means of understanding that practices are embedded in ideologies and socio-historical contexts and that in making claims about differences in cognitive functioning we need to be sensitive to these contexts.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
