One primary goal of many science courses is for students to learn creative problem-solving skills; that is, integrating concepts, explaining concepts in a problem context, and using concepts to solve problems. However, what science instructors see is that many students, even those having excellent SAT/ACT and Advanced Placement scores, struggle in…

An important contribution of cognitive style research is to make teachers aware of the cognitive style differences of their students and the resultant implications for teaching and learning. (JD)

The purpose of the National Association of Secondary School Principals (NASSP) Learning Style Profile is to provide educators with a well-validated and easy-to-use instrument for diagnosing the cognitive styles, perceptual response tendencies, and study/instructional preferences of middle level and senior high school students. The Learning Style…

An attempt was made to determine whether the traits known as cognitive styles should be recognized as intellectual abilities or intellectual controls, or both. It was suggested that the structure of intellect model could serve as a frame of reference for future research in this area. (Author/RL)

Discusses cognitive style (the degree to which perception is influenced by environmental variables) and cognitive control (which focuses on the regulation of perception by the ego). Concepts addressed include field dependence-independence, field articulation, conceptual style, cognitive tempo, intrusive information, focal attention, and…

Information about individuals' representations of problems was obtained from studies on reasoning and problem categorization. College students (N=62) participated in a study of the transition from concrete to formal reasoning using the pendulum and chemical yellow tasks. Over a 10-12 week period, 47 students participated in 10 training sessions on…

This review of the concept learning literature indicates that the greater effectiveness of field-independent learners is related to memory efficiency and the ability to conduct combinatorial analysis. Short-term memory and free recall studies suggest factors contributing to the less efficient memory of field-dependent learners. (Editor/SJL)

The historical development of learning style inventories is examined from the dichotomous concepts of cognitive styles to multidimensional assessment. Based on a series of experiments on vertical perception, H. A. Witkin formed the concepts of field-dependent and field-independent cognitive styles. Using the term "learning styles"…

The incorporation of computer-managed instruction into an academic program made it necessary to identify those cognitive styles, abilities, and aptitudes which were relevant to the success or failure of trainees in the Navy's Basic Electricity and Electronics (BE/E) School in order to minimize the attrition rate. Measures of 6 styles, 6 abilities,…

Discussion centered on three sets of factors that may influence the variability observed in "concept identification" (concept formation and discrimination learning) studies: stimulus characteristics, incentives employed, and subject characteristics. Stimulus characteristics are described in terms of the number of dimensions…

Differences in learning processes were studied in more versus less intellectually able undergraduate students. Thirty subjects were selected to represent a wide range of general and mathematical reasoning abilities, based on the following test scores: Necessary Arithmetic Operations and Vocabulary Test V2 from the Educational Testing Service ETS…

Sixty-four high school students, stratified by field-dependent or independent cognitive style, were randomly assigned to homogeneous or heterogeneous groups of four to attain concepts in the sequence of complex to simple or simple to complex, with either minimal or strategy instructions. Subsequently, each student individually attained four…

Psycho-epistemology provides a framework for this study on interrelationships among teachers, subject matter, and learners. Chapter 1 presents the polemics that lead to the problem, including sections on educational divergence, the noncumulative nature of knowledge in education, the divergence of opinion regarding the "best" teaching and…