Review_Author: James Beyers
Book_Author: Jean Lave
Book_Title: Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life
Reference: 1988; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Date: 11/30/2004
Time: 12:06:44 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.34.35
Lave, J. (1998) Cognition in practice: Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lave presents an investigation of the relationships among cognition, practice, culture, and society. Lave presents an argument against learning transfer theory: the assumption that knowledge and skills are stored in a “warehouse” or “toolkit” to be retrieved, unchanged, and applied in other settings. Lave further suggests that context shapes cognition. Lave uses findings from the Adult Mathematics Project (AMP) to support her claim that context shapes cognitive actions. Lave claims that contextual factors affect cognitive actions: “[cognition] is constituted in dialectical relations among people acting, the contexts of their activity, and the activity itself.” Lave further suggests that the arithmetic taught in school is not the arithmetic of “just plain folks” [JPFS]. She argues that the arithmetic of formal schooling involves more abstract reasoning while the arithmetic of JPFS is shaped by “situated activity.” Essentially Lave argues that school arithmetic involves abstract formal procedures while the arithmetic of JPFS employs “complex improvisations.” Lave highlights throughout the book divisions between cognitive and social theories of learning, and abstract ‘logical’ reasoning and everyday activity. To provide support for the divisions Lave identifies, she observes the activities of 35 adults as they shopped for groceries, prepared Weight Watcher’s meals, and managed money in the Adult Mathematics Project. The book focuses mostly on the observations and experiments associated with the grocery shopping. Lave reports that the grocery shoppers had little difficulty calculating best buys. However, the same adults experienced difficulties performing arithmetic more consistent with school arithmetic. In addition, there was a statistically significant correlation between years of schooling and success on the school arithmetic test, but no significant relationship was found between years of schooling and correct solutions to the best- buy problems. This suggests that the arithmetic learned in school has little bearing on the arithmetic used in everyday life by JPFS. The implication here is that math used by JPFS is different than school math. There is no implication that one is superior to another, merely that they are different. For example, in one experiment, a dieter was asked to find ¾ of 2/3 of a cup of cottage cheese. Rather than multiplying the two fractions to obtain 6/12 (or ½) of a cup of cottage cheese, the participant remarked that he was not good with fractions, hesitated for a moment, then proceeded to solve the problem without employing ‘school math’. He dumped the 2/3 cups of cottage cheese onto the cutting board, divided it into quarters and took 3 of them. This supports Lave’s claim that the arithmetic of JPFS involves “complex improvisations” rather than abstract reasoning. Lave provides a compelling argument supported with empirical evidence that thinking, reasoning, calculating, and pretty much any other cognitive activity can not be divorced from context. Social activities, culture, features of the environment, everyday practice in some way mediate the interactions of mind and context, influencing each other constructing a mutually-dependent, interactive, dynamic model of cognition and cognitive activity. One concern that I feel compelled to raise is that ‘school math’ does not have to be irrelevant to the math of JPFS. I think people just aren’t shown how ‘school math’ is relevant to everyday life, but that is changing.
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Date: 3/3/2007
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