A Study On Characteristics Of Cognitive Styles Of Science And Arts Students And Their Preferred Input Modes

The study of individual differences has always been of interest in the field of education and psychology. One important aspect of individual difference research is cognitive style, a term that refers to an individual's habitual or preferred way of problem solving, thinking, perceiving and remembering. The studies of cognitive style have chiefly examined problem-solving behaviours, cognition, the general processing of information, dysfunctional behaviours, and have encouraged studies of personality as well. Yet there have been few studies on the relationship between cognitive style and preference of input modes among university students in China. This present study, based on the theoretical framework of Ellis' individual differences (1994) and Riding's cognitive style model (Riding & Rayner, 1998), probed into the effect of cognitive style on students' preference of input modes. Two principal cognitive style dimensions are investigated: the Wholist-analytic style dimension and the Verbal-imagery style dimension, addressing the way an individual organizes information and represents information during thinking;This present study is intended to answer the following two research questions:1) What cognitive styles do university students hold?2) Do cognitive styles have an impact on story-recalling performances?The study researched into the characteristics of cognitive styles of the science and arts students with the help of a computerized cognitive style assessment tool CSAT. Their preferred input modes were then detected by comparing their story recalling performances under two input conditions, i.e., a textual mode and a pictorial mode. The effect of cognitive style on their performances under different input conditions was further examined.The major findings of this study are:1) University students bear different cognitive styles varying with their majoring fields. Students majoring in arts tend to have a combination of verbal and wholist styles, whereas those majoring in science tend to have a combination of imagery andanalytic styles. A majority of subjects in this study, second-year students of a university, showed a strong tendency to be Verbalisers and Analytics.2) Cognitive style imposes its effect on story-recalling performances. When presented with a story in textual mode, the Verbalisers performed better than the Imagers in a story-recalling task, whereas the Imagers excelled when presented with a story in pictorial mode. To be more exact, the Verbalisers recalled more details and also with a higher degree of unity when they had been presented with a textual input mode. By contrast, when presented with a pictorial input mode, the Imagers recalled more details of the story and also with higher degree of unity than they did in a textual input condition.3) In both input conditions, the Wholists recalled the stories with a higher degree of unity than the Analytics, whereas the Analytics recall more details of a story than the Wholists.Based on the above findings, this thesis supports Riding and Rayner's (1998) viewpoint that, in explaining individual differences, in addition to the constructs of ability, intelligence, or personality, there is also cognitive style as a distinct construct, and that style is different in nature and in some way it affects behaviours. Therefore, it is suggested in this thesis that teachers must take students' cognitive style into consideration and that well-selected input material can improve the comprehension and recalling performance of the students with different cognitive styles. What's more, the effect of cognitive style should also be taken into account when assessing the students' performance.