This is the page that closes the topic, and it does it with the best example in the whole course: a set of studies where children looked worse at remembering, right up until somebody changed the task. Then they did not.
📘 What you need to know
Memory strategies are learned, and formal schooling teaches a very particular set of them.
Chunking and rehearsal suit list-learning tasks — which are exactly the tasks schools practise.
Cross-cultural work on free recall found unschooled children performed less well on word lists but equally well once the material was woven into a story.
The conclusion is about the task, not the ability: what varies is which cues a culture trains you to use.
Learning also travels through apprenticeship, observation and oral storytelling, not just classrooms.
Testing memory with an unfamiliar task format is an imposed etic and produces a false deficit.
The study that flipped the question
Cole and Scribner’s work in Liberia in the 1970s compared memory in three groups: children from the Kpelle community who had attended school, Kpelle children who had not, and schooled children in the United States. Everyone was shown a set of items and asked to recall as many as they could.
On the standard free-recall task, the schooled Kpelle children performed much like the American children, and the unschooled children performed less well. Read carelessly, that looks like a story about ability. It is not, because of what happened next: when the same items were presented inside a narrative — a story the children could weave the objects into — the unschooled group performed at the same level as the other two.
Had the researchers stopped after the first task, the write-up would have reported a memory deficit that does not exist.
This is the single most useful example in Topic 6. It shows an imposed etic being caught in the act, and it shows how to catch one: change the task and see whether the difference survives.
Schooling is a cultural practice, not a neutral background
Why did the schooled groups do so well on lists? Because school is, among other things, several thousand hours of practice at exactly that. Pupils are repeatedly asked to memorise items in categories and produce them on demand, and they pick up the strategies that suit it — chunking items into groups, rehearsing them, sorting by category.
Those strategies are excellent for the tasks that trained them. They are not general-purpose superiority, and psychology built its standard memory tests out of exactly that tradition.
Apprenticeship learning is the other major route: a novice works alongside an expert and takes on more of the task over time.
Learning outside school is not less demanding. Memorising the medicinal use of dozens of plants, navigating by stars, or holding a family’s oral history are serious cognitive achievements. They simply never appear on a standard test, so they never appear in the data.
The general principle. A test measures the overlap between what a person can do and what the test asks for. Where the test format comes from one culture’s schooling, a low score may be measuring unfamiliarity with the format — not the ability underneath.
What this means for cross-cultural cognitive testing
Everything above adds up to a warning about a whole category of research. Intelligence tests, memory tests and reasoning tasks were mostly designed inside formal education systems, using its materials and its conventions: work alone, work fast, answer questions from someone who already knows the answer, treat the material as detached from real life. None of those is universal.
🧩 Testing cognition fairly across cultures
Use familiar materials — objects and words that exist in the participants’ daily life.
Vary the task format and check whether the difference survives the change.
Check the conventions: is working alone, at speed, against the clock normal here?
Ask what the participants are actually doing — strategy interviews reveal more than scores.
Involve local researchers in designing the task, not just administering it.
Report cautiously. “Performed differently on this task” is defensible; “has poorer memory” is not.
Worked examples
WORKED EXAMPLE
Practice source: researchers gave a standard word-list recall test to schoolchildren in two countries and reported that Group B “has weaker memory”. Explain one limitation of this conclusion. [3 marks]
Name it
The task format favours one group’s schooling — an imposed etic.
Explain
Free recall of an unconnected word list rewards chunking and rehearsal, which are practised heavily in some school systems and barely at all elsewhere. Existing research shows the gap can disappear when the same items are presented inside a story.
Consequence
The test may be measuring familiarity with the format rather than memory capacity.
The conclusion lacks validity
WORKED EXAMPLE
To what extent can we conclude that learning is culture-dependent? [15 marks — two sample paragraphs]
Paragraph 1: strong evidence that it is
Cole and Scribner’s Liberian work is the clearest case: unschooled Kpelle children recalled less on a free-recall list but matched the other groups once the items sat inside a narrative. That points at the strategies, not the capacity — schooling trains chunking and rehearsal, which only some tasks reward. Bartlett’s retelling work supports the same point from another angle, since English participants reshaped an unfamiliar story to fit their own cultural schema.
Paragraph 2: the limits of the claim
The underlying machinery still looks shared: all groups could remember, and all improved when the material was meaningful. So culture appears to shape the strategies and cues rather than create a different memory system. There are methodological cautions too — schooling is confounded with wealth, language of testing and familiarity with strangers asking questions.
Judgement
Learning processes are broadly shared; what a culture supplies is the practice, the tools and the situations in which remembering happens — which is enough to make most cross-cultural cognitive comparisons unsafe without an emic check.
Culture shapes how we learn, not whether we canreference at least three sources when the question requires it
💡 Exam tip
Learn the Liberian free-recall finding properly, including the narrative condition. Without that second half the example proves nothing.
Pair it with Bartlett for a two-study argument that covers strategies and schemas.
Write about strategies rather than ability. It is more accurate and it is the marking point.
Say that schooling is itself a cultural practice — many answers treat it as neutral.
“Change the task and see if the difference survives” is the strongest improvement you can suggest here.
Watch for confounds: schooling comes bundled with income, language and test familiarity.
⚠ Common mix-up
The unschooled children did not have worse memories. They were less practised at one task format.
Chunking is not a natural ability. It is a strategy that gets taught.
Schooling is not the same as intelligence. Do not let a source slide between them.
Oral learning is not simpler learning. It carries huge amounts of information reliably.
Culture-dependent does not mean completely different. Shared processes, different tools.
One task is one task. Never generalise from a single measure to a whole cognitive ability.
That completes Topic 6. If you are revising the whole thing, go back to Why Culture Matters in Psychology and check you can define etic, emic, imposed etic and cultural relativism without looking — every page in this topic runs on those four.
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