Expert Explores Cultural Factors Affecting Children’s Classroom Learning
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Since 1970, students from East Asia have outscored their U.S. counterparts on every international student comparative test. Every test over 50 years; no exceptions. “Why is this always true?” asked Dr. Cornelius Grove. Now he has answers.
“I approached this as an interculturalist and an educator. I wanted to uncover the historical and cultural factors behind East Asian students’ repeated successes,” Dr. Grove explains.
Immersing himself in hundreds of research reports concerning East Asian children’s learning advantages, Dr. Grove resurfaced with two principal reasons for their academic prowess. The first is that they are raised at home in such a way that they arrive at school with a drive to learn academically. The second is that during their most impressionable years (preschool–grade 5), they are taught by means of lessons that are knowledge-centered, not teacher-centered.
Dr. Grove’s 138-page book for parents, The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel, explores the ways East Asian parents instill in their children a receptiveness to the formal learning process. After seven chapters explaining the values underlying the parents’ mindset, he offers three chapters revealing their supportive practices. It’s an outline for action for American parents who deeply value academic learning.
A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel is the 148-page companion volume in which Dr. Grove examines the school side of the learning equation. East Asian lower-grade lessons gain the advantage because of their focused and tenacious attention to the day’s topic. Among other things, he addresses how East Asians regard teaching, learning, and why their math teaching has been so effective. Choice magazine (June issue) “highly recommends” this book for “general readers through faculty.”
Although each book effortlessly stands alone, The Drive to Learn and A Mirror for Americans combine to encourage complementary reassessments by parents and lower-grade teachers about the more impactful roles they could be playing in upgrading the academic performance and eventual college readiness of our youngest Americans.
For more detailed overviews, visit TheDriveToLearn.info and AMirrorForAmericans.info.
Author Cornelius N. Grove holds a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Johns Hopkins and a Doctor of Education from Columbia. He has had a decades-long fascination with the cultural factors that affect children’s ability to learn in school. At a 2005 conference in Singapore, he spoke about the two instructional styles found around the world. In 2013 he wrote The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today, a historical study of why most Americans believe that inborn ability determines school performance. For two recently published encyclopedias (2015 and 2017), he wrote entries on “pedagogy across cultures.” And now with A Mirror for Americans and The Drive to Learn, he is revealing the complementary roles home and school play in strengthening children’s academic performance. He also blogs about writing nonfiction at corneliusgrove.medium.com.
The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland) Hardback: 978-1-4758-1509-2 Paperback: 978-1-4758-1510-8 eBook: 978-1-4758-1511-5 Available from Rowman.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Amazon.com and other booksellers.
A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland) Hardback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4460-3 Paperback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4461-0 eBook: ISBN 978-1-4758-4462-7 Available from Rowman.com, Barnesandnoble.com, Amazon.com and other booksellers.
Trish Stevens Teresa Hinojosa Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 832.569.5773 Direct 281.333.3507 Phone [email protected] www.ascotmedia.com
Academic Mediocrity of American Students Examined in Thought-Provoking Comparison of Educational Approaches
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East Asian students have always gained higher scores on the international comparative tests than American students. How can this be explained?
In A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel, Dr. Cornelius Grove provides the explanation. Distilling 50 years of anthropological research into East Asian primary classrooms, Grove offers insights into East Asian teaching methods and, more significantly, into the societal values that shape East Asian teaching.
But A Mirror for Americans, about teaching, provides only half of the explanation. The other half is about East Asian families and parenting, revealed by Grove in his 2017 book, The Drive to Learn: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Raising Students Who Excel.
“The purpose of my books,” explains Grove, “is to convey to the general reader the research findings from East Asia, where societal values unlike ours shape child-rearing and primary school teaching. There’s an ‘Aha!’ moment: If only we could think differently about children and their classroom learning, we could raise the level of our own youngsters’ performance.”
A Mirror for Americans concerns itself with preschool through grade 5, comparing the culture of teaching in East Asia and the U.S. Among the research-generated facts revealed are these:
• In preschool and grade 1, East Asian children are taught, and they practice, individual and group behaviors that promote their own learning and their teacher’s efficient lesson deliv-ery.
• Teachers design lessons based on the internal logic of the content they are teaching, not on factors such as a need to motivate, have fun learning or draw out pupil creativity. But they do strive to present content so that all their pupils – slower and more advanced – will benefit.
• Whether a lesson is student-centered or teacher-centered doesn’t concern East Asians. Grove’s conclusion is that East Asian lessons are knowledge-centered, a key explanation for why East Asian students outperform their American peers on those international tests.
Explains Grove, “Attitudes toward learning brought from home, plus methods of teaching encountered at school, mold East Asian youngsters into superior students. These research-generated facts can serve as a mirror for Americans, enabling us to examine our approaches to children’s learning – and to the values that drive our approaches – from a fresh perspective.”
Author Cornelius N. Grove holds a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Johns Hopkins and a Doctor of Education from Columbia. An independent scholar, his “day job” since 1990 has been as the managing partner of the global business consultancy, GROVEWELL LLC.
Grove has had a decades-long fascination with the cultural factors that affect children’s ability to learn in school. At a 2005 conference in Singapore, he delivered a paper on the two instructional styles found around the world. In 2013 he wrote The Aptitude Myth: How an Ancient Belief Came to Undermine Children’s Learning Today, a historical study of why most Americans believe that inborn ability determines school performance. For two recently published encyclopedias (2015 and 2017), he contributed entries on “pedagogy across cultures.” And now with A Mirror for Americans and The Drive to Learn, he is revealing the complementary roles that home and school potentially play in building young people’s mastery of school learning.
For more information, please visit www.amirrorforamericans.info.
A Mirror for Americans: What the East Asian Experience Tells Us about Teaching Students Who Excel Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield (Lanham, Maryland) Release Date: September 2020 Hardback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4460-3 Paperback: ISBN 978-1-4758-4461-0 eBook: ISBN 978-1-4758-4462-7 Available from Rowman.com, Barnesandnoble.com, and Amazon.com
Trish Stevens Maria Jenson Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 [email protected] www.ascotmedia.com 281.333.3507 Phone 800.854.2207 Fax
Trish Stevens Anna Jones Ascot Media Group, Inc. Post Office Box 2394 Friendswood, TX 77549 [email protected] ascotmedia.com 281.333.3507 Phone
(This press release may be reprinted in part or in its entirety by any print or broadcast media outlet, or used by any means of social media sharing.)
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Veteran Political Analyst Examines Key Forces That Led To Trump Presidency
What political, social and cultural forces led to the election of President Donald Trump? Polit-ical analyst Bradford R. Kane explores 10 dynamics of American politics and society that played a role in the 2016 presidential election and continue to influence our politics in his ground-breaking book, Pitchfork Populism: Ten Political Forces That Shaped an Election and Continue to Change America. Some of these dynamics have deep historical roots, such as the cultural divide between those who define our national identity in terms of rugged indi-vidualism versus those who emphasize community collectivism. The author notes that these opposing viewpoints helped craft our national identity as far back as the 1700s. He also con-siders the consequences of changing demographics, which will have a profound effect on community relations and politics.
Kane foresees a return to established policy processes and governing principles after the Trump presidency, as opposed to rule based on a president’s personal interests. He anticipates greater empowerment of the electorate as more demographic groups are increasingly enfranchised. Kane also forecasts the potential impact of recent developments on the 2020 election and beyond. Other topics discussed are the role of the media, accountability, globalization, the future of bipartisanship and more.
Bradford R. Kane has served in the US Congress as Legislative Counsel to Congresswoman Cardiss Collins; as Counsel to the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Consumer Protection; and as a member of President Clinton’s Task Force on Health Care Reform. Thereafter, he served the State of California as Deputy Controller, Legislation, and subsequently, as a Deputy Secretary of Information Technology. He was also a member of the Nielsen Media Research Task Force on Television Measurement; created the Bipartisan Bridge (a public policy initiative to advance bipartisanship in American government); and developed environmental and economic equity initiatives. In the global arena, he was CEO of the International Commission on Workforce Development, a Strategy Council member of the United Nations Global Alliance on ICT & Development, and Director of Strategic Initiatives and Director of International Development at TechSoup Global.
To connect with Bradford Kane, please visit his website at: www.pitchforkpopulism.com.
Pitchfork Populism:
Ten Political Forces That Shaped an Election and Continue to Change America Release
Publisher: Prometheus Books, an imprint of Rowman & Littlefield
Release Date: October 15, 2019
ISBN-10: 1633885828
ISBN-13: 978-1633885820
Available from all major online retailers
