Characterizing Cognitive Styles:James Anderson

• Perceive elements as a part of a total picture

• Do best on verbal tasks• Learn material which has

social/human content• Performance influenced

by authorizing figures’ confidence or doubt

• Style conflicts with traditional school environment

• Perceive elements as discrete from their background

• Do best on analytic tasks• Learn material that is

inanimate and impersonal more easily

• Performance not greatly affected by opinions of others

• Style matches up with most school environments

Field-Dependent, Relational/Holistic, Affective

Field-Independent, Analytic, Non-Affective

Cognitive style and multicultural populations. Journal of Teacher Education, 39, 1, 2-9

Populations Exhibiting These Cognitive Styles: James Anderson

• American-Indians

• Mexican-Americans

• African-Americans

• Vietnamese-Americans

• Puerto Rican-Americans

• Chinese-Americans

• Japanese-Americans

• Many Euro-American females

• Euro-Americans (primarily, males)

• Minorities with high degree of acculturation

Field-Dependent, Relational/Holistic, Affective

Field-Independent, Analytic, Non-Affective

Cognitive style and multicultural populations. Journal of Teacher Education, 39, 1, 2-9

Characterizing Cognitive Styles:Sherry Turkle and Seymour Papert

• Enjoy working with information in context (conceptual framework)

• Like to arrange and rearrange well-known materials to form theories

• Prefer to have relationship with or understanding of subjects of inquiry

• Often need to “visualize” information

• Prefer to collaborate

• Enjoy manipulating abstract symbols

• Develop theories by manipulating symbols based-on a set of predefined rules

• Prefer to study material separate from self

• Do not need to “visualize” information

• Enjoy working alone

Concrete/Bricolage (Levi-Strauss) Canonical/Formal

Epistemological pluralism: styles and voices within the computer culture. Signs:Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 16, 1, 128-157 1990.

How Women Practice ScienceSue Rosser:Women’s Way of Knowing

• Use of precise gender neutral language to describe data and theories.

• Critique of observations, conclusions drawn, and theories generated differing from those drawn by the traditional scientist from the same observations.

• Awareness of other biases such as those of race, class, sexual preference, and religious affiliation which may permeate theories and conclusions drawn from experimental observations.

• Development of theories that are relational, interdependent, and multicausal rather than hierarchical, reductionistic, and dualistic.

Female Friendly Science: Applying Women’s Studies Methods and Theories to Attract Students . By Sue Rosser, Pergamon Press.

Women’s Ways of Knowing, By Mary Field Belenkey, Blythe McVicker Clinchy, Nancy Rule Goldberger, and Jill Mattuck Tarule.