Hi, I'm Scientific American podcast editor Steve Mursky, and here's a short piece from the April

issue of the magazine in the section we call Advances, Dispatches from the Frontiers of Science, Technology, and Medicine.

Nature and Nurture by Jason G. Goldman

How do young children understand the natural world?

Most research into this question has focused on urban, white, middle-class American children

living near large universities.

Even when psychologists include kids from other communities, too often they use experimental procedures originally developed for urban children.

Now researchers have developed a methodology for studying rural Native American kids perspectives on nature

and have compared their responses with those of their city-dwelling peers.

The findings offer some rare cross-cultural insight into early childhood environmental education.

Northwestern University developmental psychologist Sandra Waxman and her colleagues have long

collaborated with the Menominee, a Native American nation in Wisconsin.

When the researchers presented plans for their study to tribe members who were trained research

assistants, the assistants protested that the experiment, which involved watching children play with toy animals, was not culturally appropriate.

Waxman said that it did not make sense to the monomony to think of animals as divorced from their ecological

contexts.

Instead, one of the monomony researchers constructed a diorama that included realistic trees,

grass, and rocks, as well as the original toy animals.

The researchers watched as three groups of four-year-olds played with the diorama,

rural monomony, as well as Native Americans and other Americans living in Chicago and its suburbs.

All three groups were more likely to enact realistic scenarios with the toy animals than imaginary scenarios.

But both groups of Native American kids

...