Perspectives on Thinking, Learning, and Cognitive Styles

Robert J. Sternberg, Li-fang Zhang, Robert J. Sternberg, Li-fang Zhang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135663612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

This volume presents the most comprehensive, balanced, and up-to-date coverage of theory and research on cognitive, thinking, and learning styles, in a way that:
* represents diverse theoretical perspectives;
* includes solid empirical evidence testing the validity of these perspectives; and
* shows the application of these perspectives to school situations, as well as situations involving other kinds of organizations. International representation is emphasized, with chapters from almost every major leader in the field of styles. Each chapter author has contributed serious theory and/or published empirical data--work that is primarily commercial or that implements the theories of others. The book's central premise is that cognitive, learning, and thinking styles are not abilities but rather preferences in the use of abilities. Traditionally, many psychologists and educators have believed that people's successes and failures are attributable mainly to individual differences in abilities. However, for the past few decades research on the roles of thinking, learning, and cognitive styles in performance within both academic and nonacademic settings has indicated that they account for individual differences in performance that go well beyond abilities. New theories better differentiate styles from abilities and make more contact with other psychological literatures; recent research, in many cases, is more careful and conclusive than are some of the older studies. Cognitive, learning, and thinking styles are of interest to educators because they predict academic performance in ways that go beyond abilities, and because taking styles into account can help teachers to improve both instruction and assessment and to show sensitivity to cultural and individual diversity among learners. They are also of interest in business, where instruments to assess styles are valuable in selecting and placing personnel. The state-of-the-art research and theory in this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and graduate students in cognitive and educational psychology, managers, and others concerned with intellectual styles as applied in educational, industrial, and corporate settings.

1

A Capsule History of Theory and Research on Styles

Robert J. Sternberg

Yale University

Elena L. Grigorenko

Yale University and Moscow State University

Most mathematicians would make lousy accountants. But why? Do they lack mathematical ability? Obviously not. For the most part, they are at or near the top of the scale on any test of mathematical ability that anyone can come up with. Moreover, they were able to become mathematicians only by virtue of high levels of achievement in mathematics, so they are not people whose abilities simply go unrealized. Rather, they seem to differ stylistically from accountants in major ways. The kinds of problems they like to work on are completely different. For example, few mathematicians would want to learn tax codes, but few accountants would want to spend their time doing mathematical proofs. Accountants and mathematicians may or may not have the abilities to do each others’ jobs; what is clear is that stylistically, the requirements of the jobs are worlds apart.

Interest in the notion of styles developed in part as a response to the recognition that conventional ability tests provide only part of the answer to why people differ in their performance, whether that kind of performance is in mathematics or something else. If abilities are only part of the answer to understanding how and why people differ in their performance, what might the rest of the answer be?

One possibility, of course, would be personality. Someone with personal difficulties might well be at risk for various kinds of performances, in school or on the job. But personality has not seemed to be the entire answer either. For example, two people might be equally conscientious, but find they want to be conscientious in different domains and in different ways. Theorists interested in styles have sought an answer at the interface between abilities, on the one hand, and personality, on the other.

More and more, people are recognizing the importance of this interface. The concept of emotional intelligence is one example of this interface. The concept of social intelligence is another. In the case of styles, though, we believe it is important to maintain the distinction between abilities and styles. Emotional intelligence may or may not represent a set of abilities. Styles do not represent a set of abilities, but rather a set of preferences. The distinction is important because abilities and preferences may or may not correspond, as we find in the case of someone who wants to be a creative writer but who just can’t come up with the ideas.

If we want to start with an understanding of the work that has been done on styles, perhaps as good a place as any to start is the dictionary. According to Webster’s Dictionary (1967), “A style is a distinctive or characteristic manner … or method of acting or performing” (p. 873). In psychology, the idea of style was formally introduced by Allport (1937) when he referred to style as a means of identifying distinctive personality types or types of behavior. Allport’s understanding of styles was rooted in Jung’s (1923) theory of psychological types. Since Allport’s time, the term has been modified and imbued with different meanings, but the core definition of style–that is, its reference to habitual patterns or preferred ways of doing something (e.g., thinking, learning, teaching) that are consistent over long periods of time and across many areas of activity—remains virtually the same.

The more specific term, cognitive style, refers to an individual’s way of processing information. The term was developed by cognitive psychologists conducting research into problem solving and sensory and perceptual abilities. This research provided some of the first evidence for the existence of distinctive styles.

More recently, attention has turned to styles in learning and teaching. Goldman (1972), for example, classified students’ study practices into two styles: “logical” and “mnemonic.” Reissman (1964) also argued for the concept of styles in learning, defining a learning style as a “more wholistic (molar) or global dimension of learning operative at the phenomenal level” (p. 485).

But support for the notion of styles has not been limited to cognitive psychology. The broad and flexible nature of the concept of style has made it attractive to researchers in widely differing areas of psychology and related fields. For example, Conway (1992), in discussing the philosophy of science, stated that philosophical differences among psychologists may be related to individual differences in their personality factors and cognitive styles.

Fortunately, the increasing volume of published material on styles has included a number of excellent review papers. Vernon (1973) examined the historical roots of cognitive styles in early 20th-century German typological theories and then critically analyzed contemporary approaches. Bieri (1971), Goldstein and Blackman (1978), and Kagan and Kogan (1970) considered the diverse theoretical orientations that have distinguished the cognitive style domain. Kogan (1976) offered a review of research on cognitive styles from the point of view of their implications for intellectual functioning and academic achievement. Wardell and Royce (1978) analyzed problems related to the definition of style in the current literature.

Although there is fairly extensive disagreement throughout these reviews on preferred approaches to and measurement of styles, there is considerable agreement as to the empirical and conceptual problems related to the concept of style (e.g., Goldstein & Blackman, 1978; Kogan, 1976; Wardell & Royce, 1978).

The most often-mentioned empirical problems is that of the empirical generalizability of findings. Most findings in the field appear to be “instrument bound.” In other words, whatever is measured by a particular test or questionnaire is called a “style of …,” and there are only a few examples in the literature of replications in which the same latent constructs have been studied with measures created by different authors.

The conceptual problems stem from difficulties related to defining style as a theoretical construct. Specifically, there are two crucial issues in constructing such a definition. The first is related to differentiation between the concepts of styles and strategies (Luchins & Luchins, 1970). Each concept has different theoretical foundations and encompasses functional differences. Cognitive styles are adaptive control mechanisms of the ego that mediate between needs and the external environment (Wallach & Kogan, 1965). “Strategies” usually imply operations followed to minimize error during the decision-making process. At a basic level styles and strategies can be distinguished by the “degree of consciousness” involved. Styles operate without individual awareness, whereas strategies involve a conscious choice of alternatives. The two terms are used interchangeably by some authors (Cronbach & Snow, 1977), but, in general, strategy is used for task- or context-dependent situations, whereas style implies a higher degree of stability falling midway between ability and strategy.

The second issue is related to the nature of styles themselves. Many theorists locate styles at the interface of intelligence and personality, in a sense placing them in both domains, but there are exceptions. Gustafson and Kallen (1989), for example, distinguished cognitive styles from personality styles, and Myers (1988) referred to a hierarchy of styles of cognition (e.g., perceptual, verbal, and cognitive styles) and assumed personality is a source of individual variability within styles. As noted, much of this confusion is due to the nature of styles, because although styles have been viewed primarily in the context of cognition, as cognitive styles they have always included a heavy element of affect.

In the 1970s, the concept of style was further developed as it gained popularity among educators. As a result, the notion of styles developed in two directions through research in educational and vocational psychology. The first direction was primarily one of application. Investigators attempted to apply traditional cognitive styles to school settings, seeking explanations for students’ individual differences in achievement and performance via styles. The second direction was an effort to create new frameworks for studying learning and teaching styles based on empirical observations rather than theoretical background. These researchers produced several domain-specific theories of styles, including theories of learning styles (Dunn & Dunn, 1978; Gregorc, 1979, 1985; Renzulli & Smith, 1978), teaching styles (Fischer & Fischer, 1979), and even styles relevant to choosing career opportunities (Holland, 1973).

Styles have received much less attention than they deserve, given their importance to people’s functioning. Both successes and failures that have been attributed to abilities are often due to styles. We should give styles their proper due, if only because preferences can be so much easier to mold than abilities. So what have theorists and researchers learned about styles?

COGNITION-CENTERED STYLES: THE COGNITIVE STYLES MOVEMENT

A movement came into prominence in the 1950s and early 1960s with the idea that styles could provide a bridge between the study of cognition (e.g., how we perceive, how we learn, how we think) and the study of personality. A small group of experimental psychologists set out to explore and describe individual differences in cognitive functioning (for more history of the field, see Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Kagan & Kogan, 1970). Collectively, these efforts led to a school of thought in cognitive psychology, designated the “new look,” which developed several stylistic constructs, all of which seemed closer to cognition than to personality.

Field Dependence–Field Independence

Did you ever notice that some people seem to be able to find objects that are temporarily misplaced, whereas others cannot? One person can be looking right at missing earrings, for example, and the earrings seem to blend in with the table on which they are lying. Another person immediately sees the earrings against the background of the table. In general, the first type of person cannot see inconspicuous things right in front of his or her nose, whereas the second type of person can see them. In a war, it may well pay off for an infantryman to be the second kind of person, if he wants to distinguish the enemy’s camouflage from the background. But at other times, such as in appreciating a painting, noticing things sticking out from their background may be a nuisance. Just what is the difference between the two kinds of people and how they perceive things?

Witkin (1973) suggested that people could be categorized in terms of the degree to which they are dependent on the structure of the prevailing visual field. Some people are highly dependent on this field; others are not.

The kind of person who is more field independent is the person who, when on an airplane, can sense whether the plane is level with the ground or flying at an angle, without looking down at the ground; the field-dependent person needs to look out the window to figure out the plane’s orientation relative to the ground. The field-independent person also can look at a complex drawing and find embedded within it a figure or a shape, such as a hidden triangle. The field-dependent person has more trouble separating the hidden form from its surrounding context. Thus, the field-independent person is the one who sees the earrings as standing out from the table, and the enemy’s camouflage against its natural background.

Witkin and his colleagues actually developed two major tests of field independence-dependence, measuring the construct in much the ways described earlier. The two tests are different both with respect to the way in which they are given and with respect to what the test taker needs to do.

In the Rod and Frame Test (RFT; Witkin, Dyk, Faterson, Goodenough, & Karp, 1962), the individual must ignore a visual context to locate a true vertical. In particular, a rod must be oriented vertically to the ground rather than to a frame that is situated at an angle to the ground. Because the room is dark except for the lighted frame and rod, and because the person is seated at the same angle as the frame, the person cannot use the ground as a visual context cue. Thus, the person must ignore the distracting context (field) of the frame to locate the rod properly relative to the true vertical.

In the Embedded Figures Test (EFT; Witkin, Oltman, Raskin, & Karp, 1971), the test taker must locate a previously seen simple figure within a larger, more complex figure that has been designed to obscure or embed the simpler figure. This is a test-like analogue of the situations involving the earrings and the camouflage.

The field-independent person is able to locate the true vertical, despite the position of the frame, and the embedded figures. The field-dependent person has more trouble with these tasks, presumably because he or she experiences the field of vision as more fused, so that it is difficult to separate one particular object from the field in which it is placed.

Is the style of field independence versus field dependence a style, or is it an ability? For a construct to be classified as a style, it has to be distinct from an ability. If styles and abilities amount to the same thing, the construct of a style would be superfluous. The research of Witkin and his colleagues suggested their measures are different in what they measure from verbal abilities, as measured by a standard intelligence test, but there does appear to be a confounding with abilities.

One becomes suspicious of the relation between a style and an ability when one of two complementary styles always seems to be better. As mentioned earlier, one style may be better than another in a given situation, but on average, styles should not be better or worse, but rather differentially good fits to different environments.

In the case of field dependence and field independence, field independence almost always seems to be the preferable style. You are certainly better off if you can orient yourself in a given environment: It’s hard to imagine a situation in which you would be at a disadvantage in having better orientation. If you are an airplane pilot, you want better orientation for sure! Similarly, you are likely to be better off if you can find things that blend in the environment, whether they are keys lost in the house, earrings that fell onto the ground, or the proverbial needle in the haystack, for that matter. If one so-called style is always better, then the style seems to have the properties of an ability rather than of a style.

Finally, the tests used to measure field dependence–independence have the whiff of ability tests: There are right and wrong answers, and the “difficulty” of an item can be computed as a function of the number of problems the test taker answers correctly. It certainly sounds like an ability! In fact, the preponderance of the data support this interpretation.

A review of 20 studies (Goldstein & Blackman, 1978) suggested that field independence is consistently correlated with both verbal and performance aspects of intelligence, and that the correlations are moderate (.40 to .60 on a scale where 0 is low, indicating no relation, and 1 is high, indicating a perf...