| Abstract
|
:
|
This study investigates cultural simulation as a means of teaching culture and reducing cultural bias in children. Research on perseverance effects, the tendency of subjects to cling to erroneous beliefs, as well as on the process by which children establish racial attitudes, points to the difficulty in altering racial bias. This dissertation started with the assumption that an authentic, multisource setting would allow students the most efficient opportunity to integrate the diverse aspects of a complex unfamiliar culture into their belief systems. In searching for a way to alter cultural bias in this kind of setting, an authentic multicultural simulation or culture camp was developed. Students in the experimental group spent two days living in a simulated Mexican village. They slept on floor mats in mud adobe houses, ground corn to make tortillas, heard and used only Spanish to communicate, and celebrated a Mexican holiday. Each child was assigned a role to assume in the simulation such as mother, priest, beggar, vendor, and so on. Subjects in the control group were taught about Mexican culture using traditional teaching methodology. Subjects in both groups were given pretreatment and posttreatment tests to measure cultural bias, using the Katz-Zalk Opinion Questionnaire, a socialization choice measure, and an activity choice measure. Subjects in both the experimental group and the control group were also given a cultural knowledge test to measure their knowledge of Mexican village culture before and after their learning experiences. As predicted, all three measures of cultural bias revealed a significant interaction (p <.0001). Somewhat unexpectedly, the control group showed an increase from pretreatment to posttreatment in cultural bias scores, while the experimental group showed a decrease, as predicted. Results of the cultural knowledge test were not as clear. These showed a significant (p <.01) increase in knowledge of Mexican village culture for both groups from before to after their learning experience. There was also a significant difference between the control and experimental groups (p <.0001) in the pretreatment as well as posttreatment scores.
|