Abstract
Groups of formally educated and of uneducated rural Kpelle tribesmen and children of Liberia, West Africa were given rule learning and attribute identification problems. On a wide variety of measures, rule learning proved easier than attribute identification for a conjunctive rule but not for a disjunctive rule. Education proved to have no significant effect on rule learning for either a conjunctive or a disjunctive rule. The influence of formal education was restricted to the superior performance of the educated subjects on the conjunctive attribute identification problems. These findings were interpreted as indicating that formal education exerts its influence primarily on the way in which known conceptual rules are used in a testing situation, exerting little (if any) influence on the actual learning of such rules.
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