Africa's educational systems were developed by colonial and missionary authorities as a means to create a trained labor force with respect for European social and moral superiority. With independence, African nations were faced with selecting new objectives for their educational systems. Among the educational aims emerging are fostering national…

If a program is to succeed, sufficient attention must be devoted to the personality characteristics, attitudes and interests of the persons for whom the program is being planned. The data from a study of the personality characteristics of 446 poor, black adolescents enrolled in a summer poverty work program were used to demonstrate how the…

Written for the Indochinese adult immigrant and the American sponsor, friend, or teacher, the document describes the cultures both in English and Vietnamese. The first part is a guide to the American culture. It explains American characteristics that may seem puzzling to a foreigner: the value placed on achievement and hard work, the highly…

Noting that one means of better understanding the nature of cultural differences is to elucidate the cognitive differences between members of differing cultures, this paper examines Alexander Luria's sociohistorical theory of functional cognitive systems. The paper first describes Luria's notion of functional systems, the crux of which postulates…

Vocational development theories and interest inventories researched with white samples may not be relevant to Spanish-speaking individuals. A Spanish translation of the Harrington/O'Shea System for Career Decision-Making (CDM) was developed and revised. The six scales of CDM correspond to the six personality types developed by Holland (1973):…

This presentation attempts to illustrate that mathematics in the elementary grades is not and should not be "culture free." As a prescriptive course, the discussion gives suggestions on how to improve the mathematics experience of elementary school children by using the culture of both the teacher and the learner in mathematics instruction.…

RECENT RESEARCH INDICATES THAT THE EXCESSIVE NATIONAL INDIAN DROPOUT RATE IS NOT WHOLLY ATTRIBUTABLE TO THE VALUE CONFLICT CREATED WHEN INDIAN YOUTH ENTER THE AMERICAN EDUCATION SYSTEM, BUT IS ALSO RELATED TO THE IDENTIFICATION PROBLEM EXPERIENCED BY THESE YOUNGSTERS. THE OBJECTIVE OF THIS RESEARCH WAS TO DETERMINE THE POSSIBLE CAUSES OF WHAT IS…

The paper examines seven pressing issues in the educational assessment of children with learning and behavior disorders. Research and court cases are cited in the discussion of the following issues (sample subtopics in parentheses): focus of assessment (for clarification, identification, and classification purposes); types of abilities evaluated…

Adult native speakers of Hebrew, English-speaking learners of Hebrew, and an additional group of native English speakers were administered a discourse-completion test. Results indicate that to some extent speech-act realization in interlanguage benefits from the activation of a non language-specific pragmatic competence. Conformity to the…

Presently, the most frequent point of contact between the United States and many Caribbean island states is the immigrant population. Incentives for immigration are provided by a tradition of colonialism, economies dependent upon agriculture, and problems resulting from rapidly increasing populations. The continuing influx of Caribbeans to the…

Examples of cross cultural misunderstandings are examined in this paper to show how cultural (contextual) meaning must be regarded as an integral feature of the overall semantic meaning of an utterance. The examples, taken from the Filipino dialect Tagalog, illustrate how ignorance of the cultural assumptions and attitudes associated with an…

Comprising 15.6% of the city population and 8.7% of the metropolitan area population in 1979, Hispanics are becoming a major segment of the labor force in Chicago. Based on ethnic composition data for 163 area elementary schools in 1970 and 1979, numbers of Mexicans and South and Central Americans are rising while the population of Puerto Ricans…

Japanese Americans experience acculturative change while retaining some elements of cultural identity. Differences in the patterning of personality needs among Japanese American women over time illustrate the balance of these two elements. Japanese American female undergraduates completed the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule (EPPS) in 1971…

To gauge the effect that different cultural attitudes and child-rearing practices may have on the development of empathy, the Feshbach and Roe Affective Situational Test for Empathy was administered to 64 Greek city children and to 60 Greek rural children, all aged six to seven. The empathic responses of the Greek children were compared to those…

Produced for UNESCO on the initiative of the Division of Communication Research and Planning, this thesaurus is a documentation language divised for the purpose of analyzing works, articles, reports, and other documents relating to the problems of mass communication according to the particular medium to which they refer: books, the press, records,…