The focus of this paper is the inquiry of bilingual children (Portuguese-English) and monolingual children (Portuguese) as they study a community with which they are unfamiliar. The setting was a data bank that was adapted to provide bilingual and monolingual children with a great deal of information about a community in the United States. Data banks were used because they provided a structure for mapping the course of the children's cognitive behavior as they worked towards problem solutions. In the first part of the study, the Kluckhohn Inventory was used to identify value orientations of the children. The second part of the study used an inventory derived from the Kluckhohn model for analyzing differences in the orientations in monolingual and bilingual populations. The general design of the study focused on four general questions related to ethnic differences as children deal with society, and four general questions related to the Kluckhohn model. The findings of the research task are discussed and presented in tables. One result seemed to indicate that culture and chronological age might be variables that determine value orientations in the Kluckhohn Inventory. Results are discussed in terms of construction of new retrieval systems based on cultural differences. (AMH)