Here is a response to a recent question I had about cultural differences in education.

Teaching is a cultural activity. Some people think of teaching as an innate skill, something you are born with. Others think that teachers learn to teach by enrolling in college teacher-training programs. Teaching is a cultural activity because it is learned through informal participation over long periods of time. It is something one learns to do more by growing up in a culture than by studying it formally.

       

      As a continuation to the above question about teaching being a cultural activity, here are some observations done from a study called TIMSS.  TIMSS stands for Third International Mathematics and Science Study. It was a comprehensive cross-national comparison of achievement study intended to investigate math and science achievement among fourth, eighth, and twelfth grade students in forty-one countries. Here are lessons learned from that study. 

        The major facts learned from the lessons are the following:

       

      In Germany, teachers are in charge of the mathematics, which is quite advanced. In many lessons, teachers lead students through a development of procedures for solving general classes of problems. There is a concern for technique, where technique includes both the rationale that underlies the procedure and the precision with which the procedure is executed. Developing advanced procedures is a good motto for the German teaching method.

      

In Japan, teachers appear to take a less active role, allowing their students to invent their own procedures for solving problems. And these problems are quite demanding, both procedurally, and conceptually. Teachers, however, carefully design and orchestrate lessons so that students are likely to use procedures that have been developed recently in class. This can be called “structured problem solving."

In the U.S. the level of learning is less advanced and requires much less mathematical reasoning than in  the other two countries. Teachers present definitions of terms and demonstrate procedures for solving specific problems. Students are then asked to memorize the definitions and practice the procedures which is why it’s learning motto is  “learning terms and practicing procedures.” 

As this relates to game design, the question arises: Are game principles equal across all cultures, or do they change depending on the culture they are played in? Does varied instruction shape the minds of students to think certain ways, and therefore games need to be designed specifically for people in that culture? Will an educational game designed in America be equally effective for Japanese students?

Please feel free to share your thoughts and any links to information you may have on this topic.