The Match: Learning Styles of Black Children and Microcomputer Programming

Abstract

The primary mission of schools is to provide a quality education for each child. Quality education is provided when learning circumstances (activities or lessons) are in harmony with each child's existing repertoire of experiences and cognitive structure so that information can be accommodatingly modified.' When this ideal environment exists, an educational has occurred. As the principal personnel to whom this task is given, teachers have the mandate to solve the problem of the match. The milieu in which teachers attempt to accomplish an educational match for each student contains many variables that may facilitate or impede the teaching-learning process. Fulfillment of this aim is sometimes not realized for children from white middle-class families, but is often not accomplished for children who are Black, regardless of family socioeconomic level. Achievement in school depends upon controlling appropriately the match between what environmental circumstances (objects, models, Socratic questions, or explanations) the student ... encounters and the schemata or concepts he has already assimilated.2 For the most part, the classroom environment emphasizes the experiences and values of the white middle-class segment of our society, while it either excludes experiences of minority groups or assigns a demeaning role to those experiences. Likewise, our schools reward the predominant learning style of white children and fail to recognize the predominant learning style of Black children.