The influence of schooling on concept formation: Some preliminary conclusions. Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human

During the past two decades there has been an unprecedented outpouring of psychological research on the cognitive consequences of schooling. There have been important companion efforts in anthropology and sociology. It is fair to say that despite all of the effort that social science has put into assessing the influence of schooling on cognition, there is no unified theoretical account of our cumulated data. Lacking an agreed upon theory, different analysts distrust each other's data; methodological wrangles are at the center of attention; a bore and a necessity. We will not seek to summarize the extant data in detail. That has been done often and competently (for a recent review see Rogoff, 1981). Instead, we will present a schematic overview of the main phenomena that stand out from the haze of uncertain procedures and less certain assertions that count as facts. The reader should keep in mind that disputes about basic facts are not trivial. All research on the effects of schooling has been carried out with contrast groups con-structed on the basis of social forces beyond the analyst's control. The natural logic of constructing school-nonschool comparisons founders on the equally natural fact that schooling is not assigned at random to human beings, not even human beings of a specified age. In technical parlance, experimental comparisons of the influence of schooling are not possible because we do not have random assignment of subjects to groups. There is evidence from many sources that even in coun-tries that instituted universal education programs fol-lowing World War II, children have not been selected a