Disadvantages of Caste and Schooling and Development of Category Organization Skill

The purpose of the present research was to study the impact of two important constituents of social disadvantage in Indian Society, namely, the caste-status and quality of schooling, on the development of category organization skill.120 school subjects between eight and thirteen years of age were presented in a free recall procedure with a list of sixteen Hindi common nouns related to four concept categories.Findings revealed significant effect of caste-status, quality of schooling and age on organization as well as acquisition of the items.Developmental difference appeared sharper at the early age level than the late stage.Better schooling did not exercise a levelling influence in this instance.Findings have been discussed and educational implications of the study have been pointed out.Study of the complex organizational processes involved in learning of verbal items and their impact on subsequent retention has achieved special prominance in experimental psychology in recent years.Organization has been defined as a process through which certain relationships among a set of verbal items are established (Mandler, 1972).In its operational sense, organization refers to the discrepancy between the input and output item orders (Tulving, 1968).Such organization occurs "when the output order of the items is governed by phonetic or semantic relations among items or by subjects' prior extra-experimental or intra-experimental acquaintance with the items constituting the list" (Tulving, 1968).Category organization is a special case of organization in which certain categorical items presented before the subject in a random fashion are arranged into chunks or clusters during the free recall.In the discussion of organizational processes, experimental studies, have largely concentrated on different aspects of stimuli with a relative disregard for the characteristics of the subject and the environment in which he lived.Following Deutsch, Katz and Jensen's studies (1968) of the disadvantaged/underprivileged groups and Luria's (1976) discussion of cognitive processes as social phenomenon, study of verbal learning and similar processes in the context of socio-cultural variables became a legitimate field of research.A group of social and cultural factors which fail to provide individuals the experiences and opportunities necessary for the adequate development of various psychological functions have been referred to as social disadvantage.These include factors like ethnic or cultural caste-status, depressed socioeconomic conditions, poorer educational experiences, poor employment, restricted participation in community organization and the like (Gordon, 1968).