March 26, 1996 Contact: Jennifer McNulty (408) 459-2495; mcnulty@ua.ucsc.edu

UCSC DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGIST BARBARA ROGOFF STUDIES WHAT MOTIVATES CHILDREN TO LEARN

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Recently endowed chair in psychology supports Rogoff's study of intellectual development

SANTA CRUZ, CA---Everyone has concerns about schools today--from parents and teachers to business and civic leaders. At a time when creative solutions appear to be in short supply, some answers may be found in the work of Barbara Rogoff, UCSC Foundation Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Rogoff's work as a developmental psychologist has value for educators grappling with common classroom problems. Rogoff has spent more than twenty years exploring how children learn, with an emphasis on the cross-cultural intellectual growth of children. Her work in recent years has focused on an innovative elementary school in Salt Lake City that takes a unique approach to stimulating the interests of children.

Rogoff, who joined the UCSC faculty in 1992, was appointed last summer to the newly created UC Santa Cruz Foundation Chair in Psychology. Rogoff believes that children must be studied in their own environments, and the endowed chair will support her research- -in children's homes, in their schools, and with family and friends.

"Psychology typically focuses on children's development as if they were developing in a test tube separate from the real world," says Rogoff, who once used the Girl Scout cookie sale as a backdrop to understand how children plan complicated activities that involve other people and real consequences.

Rogoff says the girls she studied in that project were motivated to be efficient and effective, and they had to improvise when circumstances forced them to change their plans--unlike in an imaginary planning activity in a laboratory. "Children learn how to be flexible, and they take advantage of opportunities that come up," she says. "If children are invested in what they're doing, they're highly motivated. They'll develop a plan instead of halfheartedly carrying out someone else's."

Since 1992, Rogoff has studied the school in Salt Lake City. The public school is built on collaboration--among students, teachers, parents, and administrators. Parents are required to spend three hours a week per child at the school, and children are intimately involved with curriculum development. Unlike traditional U.S. schools, says Rogoff, teachers do not rely on the lecture format in the classroom, and students are motivated by learning rather than by grades and threats.

For example, students choose monthly themes around which the teachers and parents develop lesson plans. One challenging theme chosen by first- and second-graders was pizza, recalls Rogoff. But parents, teachers, and students got to work, and it was a very successful theme: Pizza turned out to be a great way to teach fractions, the students had a good time reading books about food and learning about Italy and immigration, and for economics, the class went on a field trip to a pizza parlor and heard from the owner about how he plans his purchases and runs his business. "Of course, pizza art was easy!" says Rogoff. Best of all, the kids were interested and motivated to learn.

Rogoff, who came to UCSC from the University of Utah, initially became involved with the school when her own children enrolled, but she says the experience transformed her way of thinking about cognitive development--and education. Rogoff's research and theoretical ideas reflect what she learned in the school and illuminate approaches that other educators could take as they struggle to improve the school performance of children.

"In the U.S., we tend to think that learning depends entirely on teaching, but learning requires the active involvement of the learner," says Rogoff. "Learning happens as people participate together in activities they're interested in. At this school, teachers support the learning, but they're not the directors of learning."

This collaborative style of learning appears to address the desires of many advocates of school reform. "One of the goals of the school (in Salt Lake City) is for children to learn responsibility," says Rogoff. "Only by having choices can kids be responsible. If children help choose their projects, they don't need force or prizes. The project itself is interesting to them."

The school has expanded on traditional "reports" by holding "share fairs" during which students spend about fifteen minutes presenting information they've learned while researching reports with the whole class. The fairs provide additional motivation for the children, who know that the judgment of more than the teacher is at stake, and the rigor of the verbal presentation ensures that the children have understood the material, notes Rogoff.

Another major inspiration for this approach is cross-cultural studies that reveal valuable differences in the ways in which children are encouraged to learn. In one such study, Rogoff looked at how toddlers and families solve everyday problems together, comparing families in a Guatemalan town with a middle-class community in the United States and two other communities. The technique was simple: During an interview about childrearing, she presented a parent and child with unfamiliar objects and then observed as the parent helped the toddler explore the object.

The result? In the middle-class U.S. families, parents typically assumed responsibility for managing their youngsters. In the Mayan families, children were more responsible for their own learning; they had more support but less imposed instruction from adults. In addition, the middle-class parents relied far more on one-on-one verbal exchanges with their children that interrupted the interview than did the Mayan parents, who were able to pay attention to several events simultaneously and who used more nonverbal communication--in conjunction with verbal communication--with their children.

"In the Mayan town, it is assumed that children want to learn, and that's apparent even at the age of 12 to 24 months," says Rogoff. "In the middle-class families, many adults seemed to feel they have to control their kids."

Cross-cultural studies help us notice how we do things, which is important for both scholars and parents, says Rogoff. "We can all benefit from ideas we borrow from others and adapt in our own ways to help ourselves and our children meet the challenges that surround them," she says.

The key to school reform, according to Rogoff, is to emphasize collaboration among students, teachers, and parents. Instead of the old-fashioned "top-down" approach that involves teachers imparting information through lectures, educators can build on children's interests, involve parents as active participants, and continue to learn themselves.

Editor's Note: Barbara Rogoff can be reached by calling Jennifer McNulty in the UCSC Public Information Office at (408) 459-2495.

This release is also available on the World Wide Web at UCSC's "Services for Journalists" site (http://www.ucsc.edu/news/journalist.html) or via modem from UC NewsWire (209-244-6971).

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