Review_Author: Nicola Edwards
Book_Author: Jean Lave
Book_Title: Cognition in Practice
Reference: 1988, Printed in Great Britain at the University Press,
Cambridge
Date: 3/11/00
Time: 8:52:26 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.240.11
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Lave, J. (1988) Cognition in Practice; Mind, mathematics and culture in everyday life
First, I would like to say that I found this book very boring and tedious to read. I only found one topic of interest, the transfer/agent project (Hayes and Simon 1977:23), and it wasn’t even written by Lave. Throughout the book he compared two experiment groups: The Adult Math Project (AMP) and a Capon and Kuhn study of task transfer. Lave made no suggesting in how to make classroom lessons to support real life situations. He criticized experiments that have been preformed stating that the context in which the questions were asked may have influenced the “just plain folks” to answer in a way that they would not normal answer in a real life situation.
Lave first explained that what we call cognition is really a “complex social phenomenon” and should be viewed in a social anthropological view instead of a psychological view. Lave believes that we cannot separate thinking from social activities and that cognitions, when viewed in everyday life, is distributed among several things: mind, body, activity and a culturally organized setting. This view is necessary because Lave wants to examine a way to accurately test if math that is taught in school is transferred to everyday life. He showed how most experiments on transfer proved that training does forester transfer of task and skill and that there are also constraints on transfer of task. When children are taught problem solving in school, Lave feels that these types of problems are a “specialized cultural product … a distorted representation of activity in everyday life”. They don’t represent real life situations or the dilemmas people face in everyday life. I tend to disagree with this a little. The two experiments that he compared both showed that people use ratios and proportions when supermarket shopping. I do realize that if the consumer couldn’t figure out the ration or proportion to get the best buy, then they gave up and picked items based on other social or memory information. However, the knowledge of ratios proportions and unit conversions are taught in school and in conjunction with supermarket shopping and other similar situations. There will always be other social influences when trying to make a decision but without certain mathematical knowledge, comparison of products would be random guesses in most cases.
In the AMP research, an average of 16% of all purchases in the supermarket involved arithmetic, 85% of 213 cases of arithmetic involved price comparison, 65% were best by problems where both the price and quantity differed. They also found there was no correlation between the scores on the math test that were given and the frequency of calculation in the supermarket. The objective for the AMP was to find out how much math is used in everyday activity and what does or doesn’t transfer from school. Capon and Kuhn’s supermarket research was very similar but executed in a different fashion. Lave feels that the objective should have focused on “how activities come together and shape each other on different occasions and what are the processes which generate qualitative differences among arithmetic activities.” However, he admits that it would be difficult to generate an experiment to evaluate this without contradiction.
In chapter 6, Lave discussed how the Weight Watchers study showed that “Math, while cooking meals and dieting, seemed to be structured in relation with dilemmas that motivated dieting and cooking activities…the measurement practices of the Weight Watchers did not appear to be determined by the structure of math or of cooking yet they were not independent of either one”. Lave also discussed how families manage money for household use and personal use and gave examples of how families distributed the money. However, when it came time to explain the correlation between the math transfer and real life situation, Lave stated he would discuss it further in the next section. This was a typical response to issues that where brought up in each chapter. There was too much jumping around. It’s hard to focus on an argument if you have to wait for the next chapter to get an explanation of the theories.
In conclusion, this book was very frustration and unsatisfying. It may be necessary to read this book several times to understand Lave’s point of view. However, after my first experience, I didn’t see his point and I don’t want to waste time trying to figure it out.