Africans' cognitive development and schooling

The challenge of cross-cultural assessment—The Test of Ability To Explain for Zulu-speaking Children

“…Abstract verbalization requires the child to verbalize, and deal with language in an analytic decontextualized manner (Cummins, 1991), drawing inference and making predictions (Verzoni & Swan, 1995). It is the aspect that would shift the child from one cultural and cognitive thinking style to another (Ong, 1982), or from field dependence to field independence (Tinajero & Páramo, 1997;Witkin & Goodenough, 1981), and may be the key to enabling rural children to achieve a better outcome in a western academic educational system (Alant et al, 1992, Cummins, 1985and Macdonald, 1990Mwamwenda & Mwamwenda, 1991). If the TATE-ZC can be used to effectively identify ways in which to achieve more positive academic outcomes by focusing on oral abstract reasoning, as opposed to using the test to highlight comparative limitation in the ability of rural children (Viljoen et al, 1994), tests such as the TATE-ZC could contribute towards better educational achievement for rural children.…”

‘Relevance’ Revisited: School Science Educational External Efficiency and the Production of Appropriate Human Capital in Agrarian Developing Countries

“…(pp.172-173) This consideration demands the use of science education as a vehicle for developing higher cognitive processes as appropriate intellectual technologies, as well as for technology education as such. The adoption of inquiry-based teaching methods is particularly important in this regard (Mwamwenda & Mwamwenda, 1991;Vlaardingerbroek, 1994), as an antidote to the intellectual passivity that commonly characterises the student/teacher relationship. In Melanesian societies, for instance:…”

Issues in the development of cross‐cultural assessments of speech and language for children

“…Conversely, differences in measures of recall have been found between Indian children attending 'good' schools (characterized by sufficient space for staff and children, transportation, trained teachers, library and recreational facilities and the use of new teaching technology) and those attending 'ordinary' schools (characterized by a relative lack of these facilities) (Mishra 1996). Mwamwenda and Mwamwenda (1991) assessed performance on Piagetian tasks in Batswana children attending English-medium and Setswana-medium schools. They hypothesized that the fee-paying Englishmedium schools would deliver superior quality education compared to the government-funded schools working in Setswana, which generally employ teachers with less or no training and have fewer educational resources.…”