Cross-Cultural Differences in Use of Comparisons: Imagery and Visual Cues

Comparison has been studied in laboratory contexts, but less is known about how this reasoning practice differs across cultures. Findings are reported from a cross-cultural study of comparisons used within US, Japanese, and Hong Kong mathematics classrooms. Two findings are reported: the use of imagery and the use of visual alignment. These data reveal that US teachers use reliably fewer imagery and visual alignment supports for comparative reasoning. These suggest that US teachers provide fewer cues of the type known to facilitate learners ’ use of structural comparisons than Hong Kong and Japanese teachers. Cognitive scientists have widely argued that the ability to map structure from one object context to another plays a central role in cognition, learning and problem solving (Gentner, Holyoak, & Kokinov, 2001). However, systematic failures to notice and use structural comparisons have also been documented (e.g. Gick & Holyoak, 1980), suggesting that the reasoning context can have serious consequences for effective use of structural comparisons. The current study examines cross-cultural differences in the types of contextual cues given to support learners’ comparative reasoning during everyday instruction in US, Hong Kong, and Japanese mathematics classrooms. Video-data from 8th grade everyday teaching were collected as par