RECONCILING EDUCATIONAL FACTORS SUCH AS COGNITION WITH CULTURE

The mainstream research in educational settings usually gives precedence to cognitive factors at the expense of extrinsic variables such as the individuals' salient cultural values and social belief systems. The present article, however, tries to unfold some reasons as to the importance of cultural factors in attaining educational objectives. That is to say, a multiperspective research frame with cultural issues as the core or accompaniment with cognitive ones can provide a better explanatory capacity for interpretation and analysis of learners' behaviors in educational settings. To this end, the present article provides four main topics of parallel contingencies, a case of value-based education, the significance of infusing culture and education, and distributed cognition as the main hinges of its discussion. Accordingly, the first topic concerns the fact that different choices individuals make are cross-culturally under the influence of external parallel factors that help them in value assignment and meaning making processes. In the second, the discussion, with a particular case study of Iran, purports that the value-based education in eastern countries, sometimes, has been the main source of upward mobility and improvement. The third topic explains that through integrating culture and education we can access some better research niches in the areas such as educational management and assessment, educational injustices, and emergence of new concepts. The last topic also refers to the fact that our cognition should no longer be regarded as solely an internal faculty since, as an example, many socio-technical inventions have expanded our understanding and the trend will continue.