Guiding Questions Chapter 3: Social Construction of Mind

  1. How do contemporary theorists view the relation between biology and culture? (pg. )
  2. What are WEIRD societies? (pg. )
  3. Why is it a problem that most cognitive development research is performed with children from WEIRD societies? (pg. )
  4. Sociocultural psychologists believe that children learn to think primarily from what? (pg.     )
  5. Vygotsky proposed four interrelated levels from which we should evaluate children’s development – What are they and what do they refer to? (pg. )

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  1. What are tools of intellectual adaptation/cognitive artifacts? (pg. )
  2. What are the two types of cognitive artifacts? Give two examples of each.(pg. )
  3. How can differences in the number naming system of cultures contribute to differences in cognitive skills and math abilities? [hint: The authors of your text discuss Kevin Miller and colleagues (1995) research on this] (pg. )
  4. What was one of the most profound tools of intellectual adaptation in the 20th century? (pg. )
  5. What does it mean to say someone is a digital native? (pg. )
  6. How might being a digital native influence a child’s cognitive development? (pg. )
  7. What is scaffolding? (pg. )
  8. What is the zone of proximal development? (pg. )
  9. How are scaffolding and the zone of proximal development related? (pg. )
  10. How does shared remembering influence the cognitive development of children from different cultures? (pg. )
  11. In what ways do parents influence their child’s cognitive development through reading and other conversation? (pg. )
  12. Describe the study of selective attention that used the frame-line test (Kitayama et al., 2003). What did they do? What did they find? What does this suggest about cultural influences on the focus of attention?
  13. What are some cultural differences in the effects of guided participation? (pg. )