Professor Cristine Legare’s work shows that to understand how children learn, we must understand the cultural worlds they grow up in and design educational systems that help all children flourish.

Scientist of the Month
Dr. Legare is a Professor of Psychology and Director of the Center for Applied Cognitive Science at The University of Texas at Austin, leading collaborations in more than twenty countries. Her research maps “cultural ecologies” of education and health, connecting discoveries about cognition with real-world interventions that respond to local values, stressors, and resources.

From documenting to explaining variation
A core theme in her work is the need to move from simply documenting differences between groups to actually explaining why those differences exist and what they mean for children’s lives. By collecting richer information about schooling, family life, stress, biology, and community values—not just test scores or basic demographics—she seeks to understand the mechanisms that produce both differences and similarities across contexts. This shift toward explanation allows researchers and practitioners to design interventions that are not only culturally sensitive, but also more effective because they are grounded in how learning really happens in specific communities.

Culture, learning, and collective intelligence
Her journey began with living outside the U.S., where she saw that there are many different paths to raising thriving children and many structural barriers that get in the way. A central theme of her work is cumulative cultural learning: humans inherit cultural knowledge and practices and then iteratively transmit and reshape them through families, schools, and community institutions. Children are intrinsically motivated to learn culture for curiosity and belonging, actively constructing their identities as members of multiple cultural worlds.

No “universal” way to learn
Dr. Legare’s cross-cultural research shows that children everywhere share a universal repertoire of learning strategies, such as imitation, observation, participation, and instruction, but cultures emphasize these tools differently. Formal schooling often prioritizes explicit instruction, while in many small-scale agrarian communities, children learn more through keen observation and participation in daily life, demonstrating that similar competencies can emerge through different pathways.

What this means for educators
She argues that we cannot “bypass culture”: effective education and intervention must start from what communities value for their children and how local systems already support learning. Dr. Legare emphasizes that teachers know a great deal about their students and calls for structures that elevate this knowledge, so research and practice can be co-designed in ways that reflect the true diversity of human cognition.

We are honored to feature Dr. Cristine Legare as our Scientist of the Month, recognizing her leadership in building a more inclusive, globally informed science of learning.

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