Review_Author: Eric Sisofo
Book_Author: Jean Lave
Book_Title: Cognition in Practice
Reference: 1988, Great Britain, Cambridge University Press
Date: 4/7/00
Time: 2:53:59 PM
Remote Name: 128.175.61.100
Functional anthropologists and psychologists believe that knowledge is acquired in "context- free" circumstances and can be used for general application. They think that the mind and body are separate and neither one has any influence on the other. Learning transfer is crucial for the general application of knowledge to occur. They don't think that rational thoughts are apart of everyday activities because there is a concensus that everyday thought is primitive and not based on scientific reasoning. Lave argues every aspect of the functionalist view by conducting the Adult Math Project (AMP) in which she observed just plain folks (jpfs) in their everyday settings to see what type of thinking they would implement. She conducted interviews and observed the jpfs in the supermarket and in best- buy simulations and contrasted her observations with the acheivement and strategies used by the jpfs in school type math tests. Lave tried to investigate cognition "out of the laboratory, out of the head, out of a confusion with a rationalistic 'culture', out of conflation with conventional 'knowledge structures', and out of the role of order-producing primary constraint on activity in the world" to better understand the units of analysis in arithmetic problem solving strategies.
While doing her experiment, Lave noticed that many jpfs were using arithmetic strategies in the real- world activities which were different from the school-taught algorithms. She observed that in different settings, the same people would use different strategies for seemingly similar problems. Also, different people would use the same strategy for problems in the same setting. There was also a large disparity between the achievement scores of the math tests (avg 59%) and the supermarket and best-buy simulations (98%, 93%, respectively). Thus, the functionalist theory of learning transfer for general application seems ridiculous. How can learning transfer occur in general when the same people use different strategies in different settings for seemingly similar problems? These scores also suggest that failure in school does not guarantee bad performance in the real-world. Thus, there must be other factors other than just knowledge which come into play in real-world activities which must be investigated.
Lave argues the functionalist theory that states that mind and body are separate. She goes into great length about how the mind, body, activity, and culturally organized settings are distributed in every day practice. The reasons for the jpfs decisions in the real world depend on a number of issues or what Lave calls structure resources. They think of how much they are getting for the price, they think about how much room they have in their cabinets, they think of the quality of the merchandise, they think of how much money they have to spend, justifying choices before and after purchasing, etc. Lave argues that all of these structure resources are important for explaining why different strategies are used in different settings. Sometimes one doesn't care about the quality of the merchandise, so that issue doesn't play a part in their decision for purchasing that item, however for another item, the quality may be important. Thus, different structuring resources makes people use different strategies to resolve their dilemmas.
Since jpfs use all of these structured resources to make their decisions, Lave argues that rational thought is evident in every day activities which is contrary to the functionalist view. Functionalists believe that everyday thought is primitive and does not involve any "real" reasoning, however Lave has provided evidence through the AMP that there is much rational thought involved in every day activities. However, Lave also argues that rational thinking "can not be used to measure, diagnose, or provide remedies for everyday thinking in experiments and schooling." I didn't understand this jump from saying that there is rational thought, but it should not be used for a scientific yardstick. I think what she means here is that the unit of analysis should not be rational thought, but the structured resources which develop the rational ideas.
This book was very difficult to read. It made references to literature and ideas that I am not familiar with and it used a lot of jargon which seemed to confuse me even more. However, I tried to get past that and come away with the big ideas that Lave was trying to impose on us and I believe that I was able to get most of it. There were many times in the book when I had no clue what she was trying to say because of my background. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how problems are solved. It opened my eyes up to something I never thought about before and I think the book was well worth reading for that alone.