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The attainment of a cultural identity is a major challenge of social development for many children from minority groups in today's fast-changing multicultural societies. Culturo-metrics is a new area of research that teachers and researchers can use to measure cultural identity and to explore culturally preferred behaviors of children and teachers in multicultural classrooms. Multiculturalism has made ethnicity, as a nominal category, an unreliable indicator of cultural identity and culturally determined behaviors. This is because ethnic groups within multicultural societies influence each other's identities and culturally determined behaviors. This finding has emerged from a 4-year comparative ethnographic study of English teaching practices between Fiji's two main ethnic groups, the indigenous Fijians and the Indo-Fijians. For example, children and teachers in one cultural group borrow more effective behaviors from other cultural groups. One's cultural identity then becomes a composite identity evidencing the cultural influences from society's other cultural groups. This composite cultural identity is measured by the more sensitive Cultural Index (CI). The CI was first used to determine composite cultural identities of English teachers in Fiji and to assess the degree of cultural borrowing between native Fijian teachers and Indo-Fijian teachers to explain and predict their culturally defined teaching behaviors. (Author)

This paper utilizes a grounded narrative to report characteristics of teaching that are most culturally Fijian. Grounded narrative is a data reduction methodology of qualitative reporting evidenced by the data. It is used to portray vividly and authentically the Fijian educational setting by highlighting the salient cultural characteristics that typify Fijian teaching. The paper depicts a fictitious culturally-extreme Fijian rural school, an ideal type. This description effectively highlights the sociocultural determinants of Fijian school ethos by reporting extreme aspects of English teaching and daily school management. The first part of the narrative described the school's main physical and management features. The second part focused on the teaching and learning of English in the Fijian rural context. The teachers' methodological strategies for teaching English are outlined. It is concluded that systematic teaching of students to the Fijian national English examination is inimical to broader pedagogical objectives, because it ignores the fact that English is not the language of daily life. This finding has relevance for the training of teachers and managers for rural Fijian secondary schools. It underscores that teacher training, without reference to the determining socio-cultural characteristics of Fiji is unlikely to significantly broaden the pedagogy of rural English teachers and hence the English language proficiency of their students. Contains 40 references. (KFT)

This paper introduces the Cultural Index (CI), which is composed of grounded indices for measuring cultural identity and predicting culturally-determined behaviors. These behaviors often are associated with ethnicity, which researchers have used as a predictor of culturally-defined behaviors. This use posits that ethnicity defines culture. However, this is not so in multicultural societies where ethnic groups influence each other's culturally-determined behaviors by sometimes borrowing more effective behaviors and sometimes marking their separate identity by emphasizing differential behaviors. This paper describes the CI and how to calculate it. It is supported by ethnographic data from a 4-year long comparative study of native Fijians and Indo-Fijians. Gives illustrative examples of CI use. Contains a 10-item bibliography. (Author/BT)

This study investigated whether stating the instructional objectives at the beginning of instruction would help students structure their own learning. Data came from 24 lessons taught by 13 secondary school teachers to 684 urban and rural adolescent students. Teachers taught different subject lessons in different classes. Students were exposed to four appropriate instructional objectives for one-third of each lesson. They were encouraged to use the objectives by being told that they were for that lesson. However, one randomly positioned objective was not used in that lesson. At the end of each lesson, students were asked to recall the four objectives and identify which one was not used. Of the 235 students who remembered all four instructional objectives, 70 could not identify which instructional objective had not been used. The results suggest that memorization of all four objectives, without the ability to identify which one was not used during instruction, indicates that the instructional objectives were not being used as advance organizers for instruction by those 70 students with the highest recall ability. (Contains 40 references.) (SM)