What Do We Mean By ‘Cultural Variations' In Styles of Thinking

It is true that people from different cultures ‘think differently'? Are some styles of thinking more suited to certain tasks and certain contexts than others?

These are complicated questions which lead to much academic argument. What does seem clear from our experience is that students from different cultures often bring different purposes to their thinking and learning. And these different purposes produce different results, for example in the way the students respond to an essay topic, a problem or a controversial piece of research. The following description of a Japanese undergraduate's essay may help to explain what we mean by different purposes producing different results.

A Japanese students, who had studied Economics successfully for two years in Tokyo before coming to Australia , came to seek help after he had failed all his first semester Economics courses in our university. His English was weak and he was very shy. He explained that he had difficulty in keeping up with the reading for his courses, so he had relied on reading his old Japanese textbooks rather than struggling with the English language books prescribed in the course. He also felt extremely nervous in tutorials and so never spoke.

He had not completed any of the optimal assignments because he either did not have enough time or else felts his attempts were so poor that he was ashamed to hand them in. He failed all his mid year exams, partly because of the difficulty in understanding the complex language of the questions. So here was a student whose attempt to adapt to Australian university study had been a failure.

At the beginning of the second semester he came to us for help with this essay question for Economics History.

Compare Friedman's views of economic planning in postwar Europe with those Samuelson.

The lecturer's purpose in setting this topic was to lead students to compare the views of Friedman and Samuelson, that is to analyse

much academic argument

writing about Friedman

academic style appropriate