Style Differences in Cognition, Learning, and Management

Theory, Research, and Practice

Stephen Rayner, Eva Cools

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415801997
• eBook ISBN: 9781136901638
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

This book aims to mark fifteen years of contributions to the field of style research in cognition and learning presented at the annual conference of the European Learning Styles Information Network. The style field is a multidisciplinary, global community made up of researchers in several domains of knowledge including education, psychology, business, computer science, information systems, management, human resources and other related fields.

The book will be relevant for readers who are interested in differences in thinking and learning, covering a wide range of style-related themes with appeal to readers seeking an international and interdisciplinary perspective. Interested practitioners will include professionals working in the areas of HR Management, Organizational Learning, Business Management and all phases of Education. The application of style differences, for example, impacts widely upon work and human performance in areas of policy-making, team-management and project development (sports, social agency, and medicine). New or alternative research paradigms facilitating revision and consensus in the field of style differences are presented. The aim of integrating research and practice is developed to achieve consensual theory for style differences in human performance.

Style Differences in Performance is a timely and field-defining volume that will change the way academics and practitioners across international and disciplinary boundaries think and talk about the field of learning style and its implications for human achievement.

1 Setting the Scene

The Journey toward a Paradigm Shift

Stephen Rayner and Eva Cools

INTRODUCTION: SETTING THE SCENE

This book was originally proposed to honor fifteen years of contributions to the field of style research in cognition and learning presented at the annual conference of the European Learning Styles Information Network (ELSIN) (http://www.elsinnews.com/); it was founded in 1996 as a multidisciplinary community of scholars and practitioners in the domain of strategies and styles of thinking and learning. Our intention, however, quickly turned to a more ambitious project involving a wish to create a collection of chapters offering leading-edge research, theory, and practice in the field of style differences across a range of domains. This idea was felt to be all the more urgent given the contemporary publication of several widely acclaimed critical texts rejecting some of the major work in the field of cognitive and learning styles, and more generally, a practitioner-inspired questioning of the relevance in style research for the applied fields of education and workplace training. A widespread opinion, furthermore, expressed time and again by both critics and proponents of style theory, has been the need for a more clearly stated, reliable, and coherent articulation of the state of the science in the field of style research. This is exactly our intention. We hope this book will represent a timely step toward realizing greater levels of shared clarity and relevance in style research, providing both a purpose and rationale for this collection of work.

Moreover, to realize this aim, we agreed from the outset to observe one of the founding principles of ELSIN and deliberately seek to bring established and new researchers together in an effort to further nurture synergy and knowledge creation in the research community. A cursory glance at the various contributors to this book will confirm the presence of new researchers together with well-known leading researchers in the field (see Appendix 1A to this chapter). Original pioneering work in style, for example, is widely associated with David Kolb, Richard Boyatzis, Robert Sternberg, Li-fang Zhang, Jan Vermunt, and Rita Dunn. The mix of more recently established researchers adds new perspective and together with more established scholars deepens our understanding of the knowledge domain. Finally, it is useful in this respect to take a historical perspective and acknowledge the work of these leading researchers over a fifty-year period. In particular, we would like to celebrate the work of a colleague, Rita Dunn, who has recently died. Indeed, the work of ‘Dunn and Dunn’ has played an influential and central part for more than fifty years in developing the field. Since what appears to have been a busy and exciting time in the days of the seminal North American Secondary School Project led by James Keefe (1985), to continuing work and development of their learning style model at St John’s University, New York, during the latter part of the 20th century, Rita Dunn enthusiastically, energetically, and conscientiously advanced the theory and implementation of style-led curriculum differentiation in the work of schools and colleges in the US and later across the globe. She also presented a memorable keynote lecture at the ELSIN conference in 2003, stirring vigorous debate and adding to the growing need for further understanding and development of style theory and its application in learning and teaching across the workplace. It truly goes without saying that her death is a loss to the field and that the chapter co-written with Andrea Honigsfeld for this book is probably one of the last pieces of work to be completed by Rita. We are honored to include it in this book.

It is not surprising, then, that our approach to researchers, of combining the new with the established, places a particular value upon the doctoral degree and the research student as well as research practitioners from a range of applied disciplines such as medicine, social sciences, and education. It is particularly pleasing to look back at fifteen years of such development and witness an evolving synergy of research between these different groups within the ELSIN community. This activity is firstly evidenced by the continuing presence of students in ELSIN engaged in a PhD study, and secondly, by the growing number of citations of research reported in various proceedings of the annual ELSIN conference, in a range of articles published in peer-reviewed academic publications. These contributions have added to the work of the wider style research field, which is a complex mix of interdisciplinary and global groups made up of academics from several subject domains including education, psychology, business, computer science, information systems, management, human resources, and other related fields.

It is important, however, in spite of all of this emphasis upon interdisciplinarity, to stress that style research should be understood as both a distinct and diverse field of research. The interdisciplinary, international, and multiverse structure of this field is reflected in the composition of the ELSIN community and the range of delegates who attend its annual conference. ELSIN conferences, for example, have repeatedly drawn an international body of researchers from different European countries and yet even further afield including Iran, Japan, China, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, the US, China, Israel, Nigeria, Hong Kong, South Africa, and the Philippines. Unsurprisingly, then, the field is diverse and complex. Intellectually, it is in itself a knowledge domain characterized by a number of different and conflicting theories, models, and terminology. The field of style research, moreover, has been criticized for the following shortcomings:

• persistent lack of research rigor, applicability, and relevance in working with contexts of practice (Coffield, Moseley, Hall, & Ecclestone, 2004a, 2004b);

• the tendency to proliferate contested and conflicting forms of knowledge (Messick, 1994; Neisser et al., 1996; Reynolds, 1997); and

• weak theory in explaining the phenomena of cognitive style and learning styles (Furnham, 2001; Sternberg, 1997).

To the newcomer, the result is a body of knowledge comprising a plethora of assessment tools, competing claims for reliability and validity, and theory or research based upon and reflecting the traditional dominance of experimental design and positivist methodology. All of this can be bewildering and disappointing. For some, it is reason enough to dismiss the field as irrelevant and even dangerous insofar as it reflects outdated forms of psychology that prevent more relevant and appropriate ways of explaining and working with individual differences and diversity in the educational setting or the management of human performance in the workplace.

A favorite example of this position is the following sound-byte commentary composed by Frank Coffield in an article in the UK Times Educational Supplement. He stated, in a partisan-like dismissal of style, that:

The field of learning styles suffers from almost fatal flaws of theoretical incoherence and conceptual confusion; for example, you can read about left-brainers versus right-brainers, pragmatists versus theorists, and globalists versus analysts. We collected thirty such pairings—the logo for the learning styles movement should be Dichotomies R Us. There is no agreed technical vocabulary and after thirty years of research, there is no consensus. (Coffield, 2005, p. 18)

For others, however, the state of the science in style research is a source of frustration and exasperation rather than compelling grounds for rejection or dismissal. It is arguably a lack of consensual theory that is preventing purposeful development of the domain and meaningful application of the construct as part of the work of practitioners in teaching, training, or management. There is a great deal of work to be done in the field if the situation is to be satisfactorily addressed, and those involved in the creation of new knowledge perhaps need to be tasked with further developing new paradigms underpinning the epistemology of style in thinking, learning, and behavior.

In setting up our own particular contribution to such work in the editing of this book, we began with an open call for chapters focusing upon ‘leading research’ in the style community. Around seventy scholars responded to this call for submission of a chapter proposal, and given the positive size and quality in response, selection of content was both challenging and difficult. It was, nonetheless, reassuring testimony that the international research community engaged in developing an understanding and application of style differences in human performance was alive and productive. It is, furthermore, evidence that this book might fairly claim to reflect leading-edge research, theory, and practice on style differences in human performance. It is our hope that the various perspectives reflected in a diverse range of international work throughout the book support and set out possibilities for a new and alternative research paradigm(s), focusing on facilitating revision and new consensus in the field of style differences and, in turn, the underpinning areas of differential and individual differences psychology (see Appendix 1A to this chapter). To this end, we have used a series of style-based titles to organize the structure of the book.

PART I: THE THEORY OF STYLE DIFFERENCES

The first part of the book comprises work that relates to the theory of style differences, including research around developing and understanding the basis of psychometric assessment of style differences; the construction of models of style and their meaning; and the work of researching style in terms of developing methodology, epistemology, and paradigm shift. The direction for this work builds upon earlier efforts to strategically frame style research (see, for examples, various contributions in: Schmeck, 1988; Riding & Rayner, 2000; Sternberg & Zhang, 2001; Zhang & Sternberg, 2009). Important scholarly tasks identified in this section of the book include the need to further affirm the nature, structure, and function of the style construct in the psychology of the individual. Building upon some of the key themes originally identified by Curry (1983), Zhang and Sternberg (2005), Riding and Rayner (1998), and more recently articulated by Zhang and Sternberg (2009), we propose that more work is still needed to realize:

1. a consensual definition of cognitive styles, learning styles, and thinking styles ensuring clarity and coherence in describing the psychological construct of style;

2. verification that styles are either traits or states in the psychology of the individual; and

3. confirmation that styles are value-laden inferring potential for differential functioning in diverse contexts.

We would add to this list of controversial issues or needs a new and urgent focus on research examining the interaction between personal diversity (style, personality, and self-perception) and social diversity (culture, community, and organizational agency). The processes of learning and teaching overlay these twin aspects of diversity and in turn further impact upon individual performance across a wide range of activity. For practitioners, this is where the relevance of theories such as the ‘matching hypothesis’ and ‘style flexing’ are to be found, tried, and tested (Rayner, 2007a, 2007b).

We also propose taking this approach further to focus upon additional action-orientated themes in style research aimed at establishing a paradigm shift and the creation of new knowledge parameters in the field (see discussion on paradigms in the field of style research in Rayner & Peterson, 2009). These themes, which are reflected in the work reported in Part I and also throughout the rest of this book (see Appendix 1A to this chapter), include:

1. Recognizing a good style theory—reusing traditional recipes, scripts, and templates defining the nature and structure of style.

2. Extending a good style theory—using new recipes, scripts, and templates to challenge, revise, develop, and, when appropriate, integrate existing models of style.

3. Enabling theory building in styles research and applied practice—in particular assuring rigor and value in research projects and the wider field of style research.

4. Managing theory-building utilizing basic and applied research approaches across the domain and between communities of researchers.

5. Developing new forms of research methodology to enable greater synergy between basic and applied style research.

The contributions to Part I, as previously stated, reflect some or all of these themes and set out a new baseline for future work. In Chapter 2, Valentyna Moskvina and Maria Kozhevnikov use a historical approach to review the existing body of cognitive style research in order to reconstruct a general logic and development in the field, as well as determine directions for future research. Crucially, they assert that cognitive style is a complex variable with multiple dimensions, and that different styles can operate at different levels of information processing. John and Esther Roodenburg in Chapter 3 present an example of new research returning to the psychometric methods employed in style assessment with a focus upon the construct interrelationships between personality and style, a structure drawing upon Jungian psychology and originally mapped out by Myers-Briggs (1980), giving us the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). They argue that sidestepping epistemological conflict and carefully managing ‘statistical gobbledygook’ can lead to reestablishing construct validity from a classical test theory perspective. For Chapter 4, Li-fang Zhang and Weiqiao Fan further develop an integration of style models drawing upon Sternberg’s theory of mental self-government. Utilizing the threefold framework of intellectual styles, the authors present the case for using this model as an encompassing term for such constructs as cognitive styles, learning styles, and thinking styles. In Chapter 5, Garima Sharma and David Kolb describe the concept of learning flexibility in Experiential Learning Theory and its relationship to integrative learning and adult development. The chapter pro...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• 1 Setting the Scene: The Journey toward a Paradigm Shift
• Part I: The Theory of Style Differences
• Part II: Personal Diversity: Style Differences in Thinking, Learning, and Knowledge Acquisition
• Part III: Personal Diversity: Style Differences in Lifelong Learning and Workplace Contexts
• Part IV: Summing Up: The Journey Continues …
• Contributors
• Index