Literature Review

Pre-Outline of Draft 1 of Literature Review

Rhetorical Outline:
Proposition: Scholars across several disciplines have been exploring how children develop
theories about life and death, referred to as “biological theories”
Audience: My main readership will be scholars and others interested in childhood
development and cognition, including those in the fields that are exploring this topic:
psychology, education, and anthropology. I think they will be very interested to learn about
scholars in other fields who are working on this issue if they are not already aware of that.
Also, teachers, parents, perhaps even biologists might find this topic interesting. My shadow
audience includes the students in my seminar, my professor, and my outside readers.
Genre: Literature Review
My Motive: I am interested in child development and also in the life sciences so I am
personally motivated to research and write about this topic. The topic is also of personal
interest in thinking about my own biological theories as a child and how they developed,
along with learning about childhood theories in other cultures.
Motive of Reader: Those who are doing scholarship in child development would be
motivated to read this to learn more about what other scholars are doing in this area of
biological theories, either to learn about this topic or to supplement their knowledge of it.
Parents, teachers, and non-academic readers may be motivated to read this review out of
curiosity or to help them understand the children they work with. Teachers doing science
lessons might get some interesting ideas from reading this.
Author’s Goal: My goal is to provide a meaningful overview of the cross-cultural multi-
disciplinary work being done on biological theories of childhood, what they are focusing on,
what methods they are using, how their findings differ or are shared so that my readers can
use it for their own introduction to this field or for further understanding of it.
Author’s Plan: I plan to open by defining “biological theory,” because it is not an easy
concept to grasp. From there I will present the work of the main scholars in each of the fields
that are looking into biological theories, beginning with the scholar responsible for first
studying this concept.
Rhetorical Strategies: So that my review is accessible to non-academic readers and
nonspecialist academics, I am going to define all key terms as well as use interesting,
everyday life examples as much as possible. I am not sure how I will finally organize this for
the most effective comprehension but will probably do my first draft in chronological order.

Logical Outline:
(Given) Biological theories are the way children describe phenomena, such as the concept of
life or biological inheritance
(Given) the life concept is the differentiation between living and nonliving things or how we
classify humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects.
(Given) Scientifically, living things consist of humans, animals, and plants, which are each
defined by their own traits and nonliving things consist of inanimate objects
(Given) Folkbiology is defined as people’s every day, intuitive knowledge about the
biological world, informed by either their cultural views or innate biology.
(Thus) researchers in anthropology, cognitive science, and psychology have been
investigating the way in which children develop biological theories
(How 1) Hatano was a major figure in the development of biological theories
(For example) 1993-Hatano et al performed a cumulative, cross-cultural study of
kindergarteners-4th graders in Israel, the United Stated and Japan and found that cultural fit of
beliefs to scientific understanding affected the rate of progression and the stages a child
progresses through in development. Children in Japan often misattributed life to nonliving
things and Israeli children neglected to recognize that plants were alive. A passage in the
Torah alludes to plants not being as “alive” as humans and animals and the Japanese
personify inanimate objects in daily life.
How 2) Medin and Waxman (2006) remedied the problem in Hatano et al’s study, which was
the inclusion only of developed countries where adults had an advanced understanding of
science. Medin and Waxman investigated cultures in less developed areas, like Indonesia and
Tzotil Maya, and compared the development of biological theories in children in these
societies to the development of American children
(That is) They found that naming practices and cultural beliefs affected children’s acceptance
of folkbiological concepts. Children were asked to sort 17 cards with pictures of either a
living or non-living thing several different times in response to different prompts, like the
categories “alive/not alive”, “could die/could not die”, and “could grow/could not grow.” The
double meaning of the word animal in English negatively affected English-speaking
children’s acquisition of the concept, while the other languages did not have that issue
because they did not have that double meaning. Tzotil Maya believe that “natural kinds,”
such as the sun, clouds, and water, are “alive” which allow children to include them in their
life concept until comparatively later in life
(How 3) Bloch expounded upon the non-developed/ developed culture comparison by
inquiring about biological inheritance in a small Madagascar village to the Zafimaniry
people, who have been long investigated ethnographically
(For example) By asking children and adults about an adoption story, they compared
responses to those of American children and those they would have expected based on
existing data. Although it conflicted with ethnographic understanding of cultural beliefs,
adults seemed to understand biological inheritance in the same way American adults did.
Children, however, agreed with explicit Zafimaniry beliefs, where an adopted child would
show the physical traits of his biological parents. American adults agreed with scientific
models of biological inheritance, as well, but children misattributed many non-physical
qualities to the biological parents, showing what Bloch et al called “birth parent bias.”
Additionally, American children adopted the concept of biological inheritance earlier than
Zafiminary children. They found that the concept of “core knowledge,” which is innate
knowledge known from birth across cultures, did not apply, but adults eventually attained
similar knowledge among cultures. Their sample size for Zafimaniry respondents was small,
but the researchers believed that as a preliminary study, the findings were valid. For future
studies, Bloch et al recommended interdisciplinary work on the development of inheritance
theories with psychologists and anthropologists.
Function: explanatory proposition with 4 premises and 3 reasons