It is frequently assumed that by virtue of their hearing losses, deaf students are visual learners. Deaf individuals have some visual-spatial advantages relative to hearing individuals, but most have been linked to use of sign language rather than auditory deprivation. How such cognitive differences might affect academic performance has been…

A new self-report instrument, the Children's Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire (C-OSIVQ), was designed to assess cognitive styles in younger populations (8-17 years old). The questionnaire was based on the previously developed adult version of the Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire (OSIVQ; Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov,…

Changes in conceptualization and measurement of the verbalizer-visualizer dimension led us to re-examine the hypothesis that students learn best when instructional material matches their cognitive style. First-year psychology university students (n = 41) studied information on three personality theories presented in text only, text+picture, or…

College students (Experiment 1) and non-college adults (Experiment 2) studied a computer-based 31-frame lesson on electronics that offered help-screens containing text (text group) or illustrations (pictorial group), and then took a learning test. Participants also took a battery of 14 cognitive measures related to the verbalizer-visualizer…