- “””people are often not good at seeing themselves as others see them. Further, what they say they think they would do in a particular situation is not necessarily what they would actually do. For instance, the test of whether individuals are racially biased is not what they say about themselves, but how they actually behave in a situation that involves someone of another racial group. In assessing differences, the direct method of observing actual behaviour is preferable to introspective self-report. While this may not be practicable in the case of someone applying for employment, in psychological research it is very important for objective assessment to take place.”
- “A person’s cognitive style is probably an in-built and automatic way of responding to information and situations. It is probably present at birth or at any rate is fixed early on in life and is thought to be deeply pervasive, affecting a wide range of individual functioning. A person’s cognitive style is a relatively fixed aspect of learning performance and influences a person’s general attainment or achievement in learning situations.”
- “Cognitive style is seen as an individual’s preferred and habitual approach to organising and representing information.”
- “The wholist-analytic style dimension references when an individual tends to organise information into wholes or parts.
The verbal-imagery style dimension references when an individual is inclined to represent information during thinking verbally or in mental pictures.” - “The valid and efficient assessment of a construct is obviously required before its usefulness can be established; valid in that it needs actually to measure what it claims to measure, and efficient, in that it can be assessed in a reasonably short time by a simple practical method.”
- “The valid and efficient assessment of a construct is obviously required before its usefulness can be established; valid in that it needs actually to measure what it claims to measure, and efficient, in that it can be assessed in a reasonably short time by a simple practical method.”
- “The valid and efficient assessment of a construct is obviously required before its usefulness can be established; valid in that it needs actually to measure what it claims to measure, and efficient, in that it can be assessed in a reasonably short time by a simple practical method.”
- “In terms of style, a person is both good and poor at tasks depending on the nature of the task, while for intelligence, they are either good or poor.”
- “The conclusion is that cognitive style is distinctly separate from intelligence, personality and gender.”
- “Schmeck et al. (1977) elaborated a theory of learning which focused on the notion of quality in thinking. The quality of thinking, they argued, affected the distinctiveness, transferability and durability of memories that resulted from the learning event (Schmeck 1988b). A key factor impinging upon the quality of learning, was the way in which an individual actually tackled the task of learning. Schmeck suggested that learning style represented a predisposition on the part of the learner to adopt a particular strategy regardless of the specific demands of the learning task. Learning strategies were subsequently perceived as a generalised pattern of information-processing activities that the individual used in preparation for utilising the memory.”
- “students are likely to sense which format of learning material or presentation they prefer, even if they do not actually feel less comfortable when learning from some inappropriate presentations.”
- “there is no ‘right’ way to learn that applies equally to all individuals, that is, cognitive styles represent qualitatively different types of thinking. Teachers need, therefore, to avoid the notion of ‘this is the way’ to learn. After all, individual teachers’ natural teaching styles will be a reflection of their own cognitive style. The students need to be encouraged to use whatever means seems to be right for them as individuals. This can be quite a liberating experience for students!”
- “Although we are not usually consciously aware of it, any information we see or hear we have to analyse and process in order to give it meaning. This analysis takes processing capacity within the brain. If the information is in the preferred mode then the information processing load is less than if it is not. For an individual, additional processing load will, at the least, result in a longer time being required to learn the information. At worst, the load may exceed capacity, and the information may not be learned at all.Some examples of strategies to reduce the load are as follows.
An imager who finds that verbal processing imposes a high load can selectively scan text and extract only the most important sections to save reading the whole.” - “Kline (1991: 26-30) among others distinguished between two types of intelligence – fluid and crystallised. The former is related to processing speed and capacity of the brain, while the latter is affected by learning and experience. By analogy with a computer, fluid is analogous to the characteristics of the hardware such as the processor speed, disk storage, memory, etc., and crys-tallised to the hardware plus the available software programs. The better the software for a given hardware specification, the better the computer works.”
- “McKenna (1984: 593-4) in considering the nature of cognitive style as distinct from ability, highlighted four distinguishing characteristics.
Ability is more concerned with level of performance, while style focuses on the manner of performance.
Ability is unipolar while style is bipolar.
Ability has values attached to it such that one end of an ability dimension is valued and the other is not, while for a style dimension neither end is considered better overall.
Ability has a narrower range of application than style.” - “Personal behaviour includes decision making, social behaviour, and anxiety. The making of decisions is important in everyday life both in the personal life of an individual and in their work. Social relationships form the basis of society and often have a great effect on the happiness of both the individual and the people with whom they live and work. Anxiety and the individual’s response to stresses is a major contributor to personal happiness and health.”
- “those who are most ‘analytic’ (i.e. analytic-verbalisers) are relatively indecisive since they will be inclined to consider and weigh-up all the possibilities before making a decision. Those who are very ‘wholist’ (i.e. wholist-imagers) will be able to see a broad perspective and the relevance of all aspects of the situation in an overall balance, and they also will not be decisive. People who are more decisive will be those who lack the constraint of the high analytic on the one hand, and the overall very wholist or balanced perspective, on the other, and this will include those whose style lies on the wholist-verbaliser to analytic-imager axis”
- “In one sense people know themselves very well, and in another they do not, because they can see themselves only from the inside, and not as others see them. Furthermore, their only experience of thinking is of their own, and it is easy for them to assume that everyone else sees things and thinks in a similar way.”
- “In a variety of situations, it is useful for people to pause and ask themselves if they could think or behave differently from how they would perform naturally, particularly to avoid the more limiting aspects of their style. As has been noted above, it is helpful to distinguish between a style which is relatively fixed and not liable to substantial change, and a strategy which may be developed to deal and cope with situations for which the style is not ideally suited. People develop strategies, or ways, to make the most of their positive points, and to enable them to utilise their style to do tasks that they would normally find difficult. They also develop strategies to reduce the effects of their limitations, and to constrain the adverse effects of the areas where they are less strong. Individuals can also learn to increase their effectiveness by linking, in their work, with people of complementary learning styles so that they can benefit by recognising their own strengths actively acknowledging the areas in which they are less strong positively recognising the strengths of others working collaboratively with others, listening to what they have to say, and paying attention to their views.”
- “Self-awareness is both liberating and empowering. Liberating in that if one is aware of why certain things are found to be difficult, then one feels more relaxed about not being able to do them easily. Empowering since one is more aware of one’s strengths and can also develop strategies for dealing with the areas that are less strong. Since style appears to be very pervasive into a wide range of feelings, behaviours and information processing situations, an understanding of style and its effects is a positive way of increasing self-understanding.”
- “FURTHER RESEARCH NEEDED:An obvious question concerns the origins of style. Style is either inbuilt or develops with experience. It could be that an individual is born with a predisposition to use one mode of representation in preference to another. If style is inbuilt what is the mechanism of transmission? Are there style genes? On the other hand there is the possibility that a style emerges from a difference between two complementary abilities. In order to illustrate this, if one deliberately oversimplifies how the brain works, one can imagine that there is one processor for verbal information and another for pictorial information within the brain. Suppose that, in an individual, these two processors have unequal speed and processing capacity, then the individual will tend to use the one in preference to the other whenever possible, and this will lead to the establishment of a style, or habitual preference for one over the other. Whatever the mechanism, style appears to be present at a relatively early age. Riding and Taylor (1976) found that the verbal-imagery style dimension was strongly in evidence in 7-year-olds. Methods of assessing style in young children and infants need to be developed. Studies of style distributions at various ages need to be undertaken, bearing in mind that the whole population range will need to be represented at each age.”
- “Range of variables affecting behaviour In considering the impact of styles on a behaviour, such as learning performance, it is necessary to bear in mind the whole range of variables that might affect learning performance by an individual. For a particular task these will usually include the individual’s level of ability/ intelligence, present relevant knowledge which is necessary to give meaning to the new information degree of motivation, including the perceived relevance of the task, gender, and cognitive style”
- “Style is not likely to be critical when the task is simple, since there will be insufficient load on the information processing system for there to be an effect. It is likely to be important, however, where the learner is under pressure because, relative to their ability, etc., the task is difficult. The investigation of the conditions in which style is most critical is required.”
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