There are several reasons why the Open University (Great Britain) should define the teaching objectives of their text editors and designers--and how they can best be achieved--including the wide range of student abilities and the allocation of resources. A model of the functions of textbook design and editing would help provide a basis for an…

Third and fourth grade students were administered a learning strategy screening in an attempt to determine: (1) their ability to describe individual learning strategies used to remember presented words, (2) the classifiability of student learning strategy descriptions as primarily visual or verbal, (3) the feasibility of using multiple student…

Visual Literacy is a field that encompasses a variety of theoretical constructs and practical considerations relating to communicating with visual signs. The theoretical constructs that influence visual communication primarily fall into two closely interrelated categories: those that relate to the individuals involved in the communication process,…

The study reported here extends the investigation begun by Piaget of content effects to laboratory and naturalistic tasks. If the accuracy and completeness of the subjects' expected variables is related to content, then performance on laboratory and naturalistic tasks should differ systematically. The subjects' expected variables were measured by…

Differences in semantic recall between students hypothesized as having either a high or a low analytic style were investigated. Styles were determined by the amount of bilateral alpha activity measured from the cerebral cortex of the brain during eyes-open baseline recordings. The results indicated that when expository text was tightly structured,…

The purpose of the study is to evaluate the influence of qualitative cognitive differences (cognitive style) as a mediator between environmental circumstances (including ethnicity) and achievement measures. The concept of cognitive style is examined, particularly as it relates to school achievement differences between different sub-population…

The effects of student personality type on ratings of instructors are examined. Research studies are reviewed and categorized into three groups: field independent/dependent cognitive style of subject; general personality style as measured by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator; and perceived needs states of students. A new measure, the Johnson…

This study, the fourth in a series conducted at the Navy's Basic Electricity and Electronics School for a computer managed instruction project, reports the relationships among selected measurements of student cognitive styles, abilities, and aptitudes. Measures of these characteristics for a sample of 166 graduates of BE/E were analyzed to…

Reported is a study to assess the Piagetian level of performance of males and females on two manipulative tasks of concrete and formal reasoning abilities and a written examination of concrete and formal reasoning abilities. Sixty-two high school students, 31 males and 31 females, were randomly selected from a biology course at Delphi High School…

This paper provides an overview of the cognitive process analysis of tasks used to measure aptitude and intelligence. As an illustration of this approach, performance on inductive reasoning tasks such as series extrapolation and analogy problems is considered in terms of the factors that contribute to item difficulty and individual differences in…

The two papers in this report explore the dimensions of the idea of adulthood as a period of continuing change and learning, and their implications for adult education. In the first paper, Harry Lasker and James Moore review the major works on adult psychological, intellectual, and moral development. They describe the major stage theories posed by…

The goal of this paper is to describe the black cultural style and to demonstrate its relationship to the cognitive development of black children. Children raised within a black cultural environment tend to develop a relational cognitive style rather than the more analytic style required in American schools. Children's cognitive styles are based…

A study was conducted to determine if a relationship exists between cognitive styles and learning performance. Seventy students enrolled in three sections of an introductory instructional media course at a southeastern university served as subjects for the study. Testing instruments were administered to the students to determine their cognitive…

A sample of 503 sixth-grade students participated in a study assessing the relationship between modality of inference and spelling achievement. Each student completed the Dictation Spelling Test and the Modality of Inference Instrument; scores from the Iowa Test of Basic Skills were also available. The Modality of Inference Instrument was…

This paper presents the thesis that a perceptual rationale for visual literacy may be found in operational form within what is measured by established tests of cognitive style. Ten primary dimensions of cognitive style are briefly reviewed, including field independence-field dependence, impulsivity-reflectivity, visual-haptic, leveling-sharpening,…