Cultural_Foundations_of_Learning.pdf

Cultural Foundations of Learning

Western and East Asian people hold fundamentally diferent beliefs about

learning that inluence how they approach childrearing and education.

Reviewing decades of research, Dr. Jin Li presents an important conceptual dis-

tinction between the Western mind model and the East Asian virtue model

of learning. he former aims to cultivate the mind to understand the world,

whereas the latter prioritizes the self to be perfected morally and socially. Tracing

the cultural origins of the two large intellectual traditions, Li details how each

model manifests itself in the psychology of the learning process, learning afect,

regard of one’s learning peers, expression of what one knows, and parents’ guid-

ing eforts. Despite today’s accelerated cultural exchange, these learning models

do not diminish but endure.

Dr. Jin Li is associate professor of Education and Human Development at

Brown University. Her research examines diferent cultural learning models

and how such culturally based models shape children’s learning beliefs and

achievement. She collaborates with researchers from Taiwan, Hong Kong,

the United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, and the United States. Dr. Li has pub-

lished in leading journals such as American Psychologist , Journal of Educational

Psychology , Child Development , Developmental Psychology , Ethos , and Cognition

and Emotion , among others.

Cultural Foundations of Learning

east and west

Jin Li

Brown University