Behavioral Style, Culture, and Teaching and Learning

For more than a year a bitter debate raged in the state of New York over a 1988 State Department of Education school dropout report that focused on minority children. The New York report cited certain passages from Hale's (1982) work, Black Children: Their Roots, Culture, and Learning Styles, and a document I prepared for the California State Department of Education entitled Alternatives to IQ Testing: An Approach to the Identification of Gifted Minority Children (Hilliard, 1976). The controversy stemmed from the position that unique behavioral style factors could be identified among African American populations. However, the discussion about these citations, both by those citing Hale's and my work and by those who disagreed with our conclusions, failed to take into account the context of the passages. Moreover, few people who cited my study actually read the document itself. As a result of the controversy, the New York State Department of Education decided to convene a meeting of researchers in Albany, New York, to present the state-of-the-art in research on cognitive and behavioral style. The present article is adapted from a position paper presented at that conference. One aspect of the work I did in California involved taking a close look at the matter of behavioral style, which included but was broader than cognitive style. I was exploring the idea then that behavioral style might help to explain the gap in test performance between White and Black students (or between any two groups of students, for that matter). The assumption was that two groups of students with the same intellectual potential would, because of diversity in cultural socialization, develop habits and preferences that would cause them to manifest their mental powers in somewhat different ways. The research I was doing at that time was focused on testing and assessment issues. It did not focus direction on the use of testing and assessment data for the design of instruction in settings that could be characterized as culturally diverse. However, I fully expected then, just as I do now, that diversity in behavioral style, which also is correlated to group behavior among cultural groups, would be a meaningful phenomenon to be considered in the delivery of instruction. Naturally, the utility of behavioral style for instructional planning is dependent upon systematic study of the nature and potential of that style for teaching and learning.