the effect of cognitive style and cognitive skills on school subject performance

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This article was downloaded by: [Cukurova Universitesi] On: 05 November 2014, At: 00:26 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Educational Studies Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceds20 The Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills on School Subject Performance Richard Riding a & Tina Agrell a a Assessment Research Unit , School of Education, University of Birmingham , B15 2TT, UK b Halton Roman Catholic School Board , Ontario, Canada Published online: 06 Jul 2006. To cite this article: Richard Riding & Tina Agrell (1997) The Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills on School Subject Performance, Educational Studies, 23:2, 311-323, DOI: 10.1080/0305569970230213 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305569970230213 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/ terms-and-conditions

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Page 1: The Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills on School Subject Performance

This article was downloaded by: [Cukurova Universitesi]On: 05 November 2014, At: 00:26Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Educational StudiesPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceds20

The Effect of Cognitive Style andCognitive Skills on School SubjectPerformanceRichard Riding a & Tina Agrell aa Assessment Research Unit , School of Education, University ofBirmingham , B15 2TT, UKb Halton Roman Catholic School Board , Ontario, CanadaPublished online: 06 Jul 2006.

To cite this article: Richard Riding & Tina Agrell (1997) The Effect of Cognitive Style andCognitive Skills on School Subject Performance, Educational Studies, 23:2, 311-323, DOI:10.1080/0305569970230213

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0305569970230213

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoeveras to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Anyopinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of theauthors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy ofthe Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified withprimary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses,actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, inrelation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms& Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

Page 2: The Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills on School Subject Performance

Educational Studies, Vol. 23, No. 2, 1997 311

The Effect of Cognitive Style andCognitive Skills on School SubjectPerformanceRICHARD RIDINGAssessment Research Unit, School of Education, University of BirminghamB15 2TT, UK

TINA AGRELLHalton Roman Catholic School Board, Ontario, Canada

SUMMARY Two hundred and five 14-16 year olds from two Anglophone Canadian schools(99 females and 106 males) were given the Canadian Test of Cognitive Skills (an intelligence-type test) and the Cognitive Styles Analysis and their grade 9 scores in the subjects of French,English, mathematics, geography and science were obtained. The study first looked at therelationship between cognitive skills and cognitive style. The correlation between cognitive skillsand cognitive style approached zero suggesting their independence. Having confirmed theindependence of cognitive skills and cognitive style, their interactive effect, including gender, onsubject performance was investigated by means of analysis of variance. There was a significantinteraction between sex and subject; females were superior to males in all five subjects, butparticularly so in French and English. There was also a significant interaction between skill,style and subject in their effect on performance. This was discussed in terms of the role of stylein learning and the effect of skill/intelligence on strategy development.

Introduction

An understanding of the factors that affect the academic performance of schoolstudents is of practical importance. Two of these factors are students' cognitivestyles and cognitive skills. This paper will consider the nature of cognitive styleand cognitive skills and their relationship to school performance.

Cognitive Style

Cognitive style has been defined by Tennant (1997, p. 80) as 'an individual'scharacteristic and consistent approach to organising and processing information'.The background to cognitive styles and their assessment has been reviewed byRiding & Cheema (1991). The two basic dimensions of cognitive style may besummarised as follows:

0305-5698/97/020311-13 © 1997 Carfax Publishing Ltd

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(1) The wholist-analytic style of the extent to which an individual tends toprocess information in wholes or parts.

(2) The verbal-imagery style of whether an individual is inclined to repre-sent information during thinking verbally or in mental images.

Assessment of Cognitive Style

The two dimensions may be assessed using the Cognitive Styles Analysis (Riding,1991). It directly assesses both ends of the wholist-analytic and verbal-imagerydimensions and comprises three subtests. The first assesses the verbal-imagerydimension by presenting statements to be judged true or false one at a time.Half the statements contain information about conceptual categories while therest describe the appearance of items. Half the statements of each type are true.It was assumed that imagers would respond more quickly to the appearancestatements, because the objects could be readily represented as mental picturesand the information for the comparison could be obtained directly and rapidlyfrom these images. In the case of the conceptual category items, it was assumedthat verbalisers would have a shorter response time because the semanticconceptual category membership is verbally abstract in nature and is difficult torepresent in visual form. A computer is used to record the response time to eachstatement and calculate the verbal-imagery ratio. A low ratio corresponds to averbaliser and a high ratio to an imager, with the intermediate position beingdescribed as bimodal. It may be noted that in this approach individuals have toread both the verbal and the imagery items so that it is not a test of readingability or of reading speed.

The second two subtests assess the wholist-analytic dimension. The first ofthese presents items containing pairs of complex geometrical figures which theindividual is required to judge either the same or different. Since this task involvesjudgements about the overall similarity of the two figures, it was assumed that arelatively fast response to this task would be possible by wholists. The secondpresents items which each comprise of a simple geometrical shape (e.g. a squareor a triangle) and a complex geometrical figure and the individual is asked toindicate whether or not the simple shape is contained in the complex one bypressing one of the two marked response keys. This task requires a degree ofdisembedding of the simple shape within the complex geometrical figure in orderto establish that it is the same as the simple stimulus shape displayed and it wasassumed that analytics would be relatively quicker at this. Again a computer isused to record the latency of the responses and calculate the wholist-analyticratio. A low ratio corresponds to a wholist and a high ratio to an analytic. Ratiosbetween these positions are labelled intermediate. The background to the devel-opment of the Cognitive Styles Analysis is given in Riding & Cheema (1991).

Cognitive Styles and Learning Performance

The relationship between style and learning performance has been extensivelyreviewed by Riding (1997). Selected studies will be reviewed here.

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Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills 313

Learning material structure and mode. Several studies have found that an indi-vidual's position on the wholist-analytic dimension interacts with the structureof the learning material to affect performance. When presented with a prosepassage for recall, Douglas & Riding (1993) found that the 11 year old pupils,wholists did best when the title of the passage was given before the passage waspresented rather than at the end, although this had little effect on analytics. Theresult was interpreted as due to the wholists being less able to structure material,being helped by a title at the beginning to give some organisation to the material.

Riding & Sadler-Smith (1992) compared performance on two versions ofcomputer-presented instructional material on central heating systems with 14-19year old students. The two versions presented the same information but onealso contained an introduction to the five topics and each topic had a shortoverview at the start and a summary at the end. In addition, there was an overallsummary at the end of the five topics. This treatment slightly improved therecall performance for analytic-verbalisers and wholist-imagers, but the addi-tional material reduced performance for the other two styles, wholist-verbalisersand analytic-imagers. This was explained in terms of a lack of a facility to obtaina whole view on the part of the analytic-verbalisers and by the wholist-imagersbeing able to analyse the information readily to see its structure. For these stylesthe overview and summaries provided these to some extent. In contrast, thewholist-verbalisers and analytic-imagers had some facility to do this for them-selves and the additional material was therefore redundant and probablydepressed performance.

In summary, wholists will benefit from help in structuring material, whileanalytics should be able to impose their own structure upon it.

Mode of presentation. Two modes of presentation are available: the verbaland the pictorial. Riding & Ashmore (1980), studying 11 year old pupils,presented groups of verbalisers and imagers (as assessed by the earlier verbal-imagery code test) with either a verbal or a pictorial version of the sameinformation. They found that verbalisers were superior with the verbal versionand imagers when learning in the pictorial mode. Within the instructionalcontext, while purely verbal presentation is often possible, an alternative purelypictorial version is rarely an option as some words will also be necessary.However, it is usually feasible to present information in both modes to someextent. Riding & Douglas (1993), with 15-16 year old students, found that acomputer presentation of material on motor car braking systems in a text-plus-picture format facilitated the learning by imagers compared to the same contentin a text-plus-text version. They found further that at recall in the text-plus-picture condition 50% of the imagers used illustrations as part of their answerscompared to only 12% of the verbalisers. Generally, imagers learn best frompictorial presentations, while verbalisers learn best from verbal presentations.

Type of content. In the case of the type of content of the learning material,studies of 11 and 12 year old pupils indicated that imagers recall a highly visuallydescriptive text better than acoustically complex and unfamiliar text, while the

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314 R. Riding & T. Agrell

reverse holds for verbalisers (Riding & Calvey, 1981). The initial readingperformance, which is obviously a very verbal task, has been found to besuperior in verbalisers. Riding & Anstey (1982) assessed reading accuracy andcomprehension in 7 year old children and found that both declined fromverbaliser to imager. In terms of content type, individuals appear to learn bestwhen information can be readily translated into their preferred verbal-imagerymode of representation.

Learning preference. Two methods of assessing learning preferences have beenused: self-report and observed behaviour choices.

Self-report measures. In an investigation by Riding & Read (1996), 12 yearold pupils were individually questioned about their preferences in the subjectsof English language and science with respect to mode of working and socialcontext. With respect to mode of working, in the case of higher ability pupils,imagers, particularly if they are wholists, reported that they used less writingand more pictures than verbalisers, particularly where the subject allowed, as inscience. The tendency by imagers to use pictures and verbalisers writingincreased with ability. There was evidence that lower ability pupils were moreconstrained by the usual format of the subject than were those of higher ability.

Observed behaviour choices. In a study by Riding & Watts (1997), 16 yearold female students were told that three versions of a sheet giving informationon study skills had been prepared for them and that each sheet contained thesame information but that the formats were different. They were then invited toselect one of the versions. The versions were unstructured verbal (paragraphswithout headings), structured verbal (paragraphs each with a clear heading) andstructured pictorial (paragraphs with a clear heading and a pictorial icondepicting the activity placed in the left margin). None of the pupils chose theunstructured-verbal version. With the two structured versions, there was asignificant interaction with verbal-imagery style with the majority of theverbalisers selecting the verbal version and most of the imagers the pictorial one.On the wholist-analytic dimension the pictorial version was more attractive tothe wholists, perhaps because it looked more 'lively', while with the analyticsthere was a slight preference for the more 'neat and tidy' verbal format.

The results suggested that pupils are attracted to and prefer to selectmaterials that appear to suit their own style.

Style and Intelligence

Cognitive style appears to be independent of intelligence. Riding & Pearson(1994), with a sample of 12-13 year old pupils, found that intelligence, asmeasured by the subtests of the British Abilities Scale (Elliot, 1983), was notrelated to cognitive style. The correlations between the four subtests used andthe wholist-analytic and verbal-imagery ratios were all low and non-significant

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Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills 315

and were, respectively, digits —0.01, 0.12, similarities —0.03, 0.01, matrices— 0.10, 0.04 and speed of information processing 0.07, 0.02.

Both style and intelligence will affect the performance on a given task. Thebasic distinction between them is that the performance on all tasks will generallyimprove as intelligence increases, whereas the effect of style on performance foran individual will either be positive or negative depending on the nature of thetask. It follows from this that for an individual at one end of the style dimension,a task of a type they find difficult will be found easier by someone at the otherend of the dimension and vice versa. For instance, if the dimension were theverbal-imagery style, then verbalisers would find pictorial tasks more difficultthan would imagers, but would find highly verbal tasks easier than wouldimagers. In other words, in terms of style, a person is both good and poor attasks depending on the nature of the task, while for intelligence, they are eithergood or poor.

Style and Strategy

It is useful to distinguish between styles and strategies. Styles are probablyinbuilt features having a neurophysiological basis (see Riding et ai, 1997). Incontrast, strategies are ways that are learned and developed to cope withsituations and tasks and, in particular, are methods of using style to make thebest of situations for which the style is not ideally suited.

The first step to strategy development is an awareness by a student that asubject presents difficulty. The next is a self-understanding of cognitive style andof the style's appropriateness for the subject area, whether it is in terms of thestructure and meaning or mode of representation and, hence, informationprocessing load. Strategies can then be considered which may mitigate anymismatch between subject and style. An example of a simple strategy could bechanging the mode of presentation to match the position on the verbal-imagerydimension. For instance, a verbaliser could change the pictorial informationpresented by a book or lecturer into words, and the imagers could changewords to illustrations or diagrams. (Other examples are given in Riding (1996,pp. 26-27).)

Aim

The aim of the present study was to investigate the relationship between cognitivestyle and cognitive skills and school achievement.

Method

Sample

The sample comprised 205 14-16 year old pupils (99 females and 106 males)from two urban schools (school A 24 and school B 181). Both schools were

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TABLE I. Test items

Time allowedSubtest title Task (min)

Sequences From four items choose one to continue a given pattern orsequence 13

Analogies Given a pair of conceptually related pictures, choose one offour pictures to go with another given picture to make asecond related pair 7

Memory Having before the start of the test learned a nonsense namefor an existing word, select from five nonsense words theone that means the given existing word 5

Verbal reasoning For a given word or words, indicate one from the four listedthat is related to the given word(s) 12

Anglophone and all the students communicated in English, although theyoriginated from many different countries and 21 different first languages werespoken.

Materials and Procedure

Canadian Test of Cognitive Skills. This English-language, intelligence-type testis comprised of four 20-item subtests (see Table I) (see Canadian Test Centre,1992a,b).

The items were very similar in style to those commonly found in intelligencetest, for example the British Abilities Scales (Elliot, 1983) and the WechslerIntelligence Scale for Children (Wechsler, 1974) and the test could be thoughtof as a test of intelligence.

The Canadian Test of Cognitive Skills scores for the sample were obtainedfrom the school boards, the test having been given to all pupils as part of aProvincial Ministry of Education grade 9 testing at the start of the school year.

Assessment of learning styles. The Cognitive Styles Analysis [1] (Riding, 1991)was used to determine the learning styles of the sample. The Cognitive StylesAnalysis was individually computer presented to the pupils in computer labora-tories in groups of 15 during their grade 9 year.

Measures of school achievement. The performance in school subjects was takenas the end of year marks in the grade 9 'core' subjects of French, English,mathematics, geography and science. The percentage scores were obtained fromthe computer printout generated in the Guidance Department.

Results and Discussion

The results will be considered in two sections: the relationship between cognitivestyles and cognitive skills and the relationship between these variables, genderand school achievement. These will be reported in turn.

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Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills 317

TABLE II. Correlation between style and cognitive skill subtests

WAVISEQANALMEMVERTotal

WA

_

0.010.01

-0.01-0.03-0.02-0.02

VI

0.01-

-0.10-0.05-0.03-0.10-0.06

SEQ

0.01-0.10

-0.57*0.42*0.50*0.81*

ANAL

-0.01-0.05

0.57*-0.40*0.49*0.79*

MEM

-0.03-0.03

0.42*0.40*-0.36*0.70*

VER

-0.02-0.10

0.50*0.49*0.36*-0.74*

Total

-0.02-0.06

0.81*0.79*0.70*0.74*-

*p < 0.001. WA Wholist-analytic Ratio; VI Verbal-imagery Ratio; SEQ Sequences; ANAL Analo-gies; MEM Memory; VER Verbal reasoning.

Cognitive Styles and Cognitive Skills

The relationship between style and cognitive skills was considered in two ways:correlation and, in order to look for possible interactive effects of style oncognitive skills, by means of analysis of variance.

Correlation. Since the style ratios are based on response latencies they tend tobe skewed and to make them more normal a square-root transformation wasapplied to them for the correlation. The correlation between the style measuresand the cognitive skills subtests and overall score are given in Table II.

An inspection of Table II indicates a very low correlation between the twostyle dimensions. Further, the correlation between each of the style dimensionsand the cognitive skill subtests is also very low and insignificant. In contrast, thecorrelation between the cognitive skills subtests is generally moderately high andin all cases significant (p < 0.001).

Interactive effects. In considering the relationship between style and skill, it ispossible that the two style dimensions interact in their effect on skill and, tocheck this, the pupils were divided into each of the two style dimensions, on thebasis of the untransformed ratios, in two similarly sized groups (wholist-analyticdimension, wholists 0.47-1.02 and analytics 1.03-3.05 and verbal-imagerydimension, verbalisers 0.35-1.05 and imagers 1.06-3.93). An analysis of vari-ance of sex (2) by wholist-analytic style (2) by verbal-imagery style (2) wasperformed with repeated measures on the four subtests. This did not show anysignificant effects over all the subtests (p>0.05). (There was a significantinteraction between sex, verbal-imagery style and subtest (F=3.84, df. 3.591and p = 0.010). Since this was due to a difference in the girls on the memorysubtest only, with the imagers doing better than the verbalisers and because allof the means on the other subtests were very similar, it will not be discussedfurther here.)

The finding of no relationship between style and the overall measure ofcognitive skills suggests that they are generally independent in origin, as found

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318 R. Riding & T. Agrell

by Riding & Pearson (1994). They are, nevertheless, likely to interact in theireffects on school achievement and this will be examined below.

Gender differences. Previous studies have not found overall gender differenceswith respect to cognitive style. The differences are usually small and non-significant for both dimensions (p<0.05) (see Riding, 1997). To check this inthe present sample, two one-way analyses of variance were performed taking thetransformed ratios on each dimension in turn as the dependent variable and sexas the independent variable. For the wholist-analytic dimension the males wereslightly more analytic than the females, respectively 1.08 (SD 0.20) and 1.03(SD 0.14) and this difference was significant (F= 4.38, df 1.203 andp = 0.038).On the verbal-imagery dimension there was no hint of significance (p = 0.697).The reason for the difference in this case is not clear, but in the considerationof the effect of style and cognitive skills on school subject performance, sex willbe included as a variable in the analysis to control for any possible confoundingeffects.

Cognitive Style, Cognitive Skills and School Performance

In order to assess the influence of cognitive skills using the overall standardisedscore (the tests were scored by the publisher using the national norms), thesample was split at the median; low 1-60 and high 61-99. An analysis ofvariance of sex (2) by cognitive skill (2) by wholist-analytic style (2) byverbal-imagery style (2) with repeated measures on subject 5 was performed onthe data.

Gender and subject. There was a significant effect of sex (F = 10.53, df 1.189and p = 0.001), subject (F= 19.80, df 4.756 and p < 0.001) and sex by subject(F= 2.43, df 4.756 and p = 0.046) and this is shown in Table III.

An inspection of Table III shows that the females were superior to the malesin all five subjects and, in particular, in French and English. Riding & Pearson(1994) studying 12-13 year old British children also found that the femaleswere superior to the males in French, geography and English, but that there was

TABLE III. Sex differences in subject performance

Subject

EnglishFrenchGeographyMathematicsScience

Mean subject score(with SD in brackets)

Females

76.69 (9.92)74.89 (11.85)76.73 (14.83)76.97 (14.63)70.84 (14.22)

Males

68.72 (13.20)68.46 (12.49)71.74 (14.70)72.20 (16.58)66.57 (15.73)

Difference(F-M)

7.976.434.994.774.27

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Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills 319

Fre

FIG. 1. Subject performance, cognitive skills and cognitive style.

little difference in mathematics and science. The present results follow thegenerally observed pattern of females out-performing males in most subjects butless so in mathematics and science (see, for instance, Skaalvik & Rankin, 1994).The interpretation of sex differences is fraught with difficulty, since there is aconfounding of cultural and biological variables.

Cognitive skills, style and subject. There was an overall significant effect ofcognitive skill (F= 54.77, df 1.189 and p< 0.001), a significant interactionbetween cognitive skill, wholist-analytic style and verbal-imagery style in theireffect on overall performance (F = 4.59, df 1.189 andp = 0.033) and a significantinteraction between cognitive skill and subject (F = 4.19, df 4.756 andp = 0.002)and between cognitive skill, wholist-analytic style, verbal-imagery style andsubject (F = 4.12, df 4.756 and p = 0.003), and this is shown in Fig. 1.

In considering the results, two general points may be made first. Theseconcern what cognitive skill/intelligence tests measure and style and performancein particular subjects.

(1) With respect to cognitive skills/intelligence measures, these are likely toinclude more than just the processing capacity and facility, since theitems commonly used in 'intelligence' tests also assess learned know-ledge and the application of acquired skills. They therefore includewithin the measure, the ability to learn and perform and, hence, explainmore of the variance than style, but they are not pure measures.

(2) The study of educational achievement and style poses problems. Thesederive from the nature of the subject, the ways in which it has beentaught and the methods used to assess performance. A subject usuallyvaries considerably within itself in terms of the type of content and therange of processing required. In considering subjects they are rarely of

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320 R. Riding & T. Agrell

a unitary nature. For example, mathematics requires sequential opera-tions for arithmetic, abstractions for algebra and spatial representationsfor geometry. In school mathematics these are usually interwoven insuch a way that equal overall mathematics performances in two studentscould result from strengths in quite different areas. Similarly, in geo-graphy, the diverse elements that make up the subject include humangeography and map reading and these are likely to require quite differentabilities. The method of instruction will vary from teacher to teacherand probably be a reflection of their styles. Further, the form ofassessment can be varying proportions of coursework and unseenexaminations and can also vary in mode (verbal or pictorial). All ofthese variables will affect the performance by an individual and in realityit is not easy or probably possible to control for them. In view of this avery definite difference between the performances on subjects withrespect to style would not be expected and no significant interactionbetween style and subject was observed. However, subjects such asEnglish and French benefit from verbalisation, while science and geo-graphy find imagery useful. In addition, science and geography arelikely to require a degree of analysis while French and English need amore overall view.

Bearing these two points in mind, the two levels of cognitive skill and thedifference between them will be considered separately.

Low cognitive skills. An inspection of Fig. 1 indicates that for the lowcognitive skill group (shown by fine lines), the greatest overall variation inperformance is by the analytics (solid symbols), where generally verbalisers(triangles) do best and imagers (circles) do least well. The exception is Frenchwhere analytic-imagers do as well as the others. For wholists (open symbols),the performances are more similar for verbalisers and imagers, but there is across-over, with imagers doing best on mathematics and geography andverbalisers on English and French.

The extent to which a style is naturally appropriate to academic subjects islikely to be most marked when the level of cognitive skill is low, since more ofthe academic performance will then depend on the style itself. The order inoverall performance across subjects from highest to lowest was analytic-verbalisers 70.59 (SD 10.83), wholist-verbalisers 66.89 (SD 12.86), wholist-imagers 65.96 (SD 12.52) and analytic-imagers 61.00 (SD 12.23). The analytic-verbalisers appear naturally suited to all of the subjects, probably because allsubjects require an element of verbalisation together with a need to be able toanalyse. In contrast, the analytic-imagers appear naturally to be least suited toacademic subjects, perhaps because they lack fluent verbalisation.

High cognitive skills. In the case of the high cognitive skill group (shown bybold lines), the wholist-verbalisers (open triangles) and the wholist-imagers(open circles) do best. The overall order of performance was the same as for the

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25 r

Mat

Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills 321

Fre

FIG. 2. Difference in subjects between high and low cognitive skill groups.

low cognitive skill group except in the case of analytic-verbalisers (solid triangles),who go from the highest to the lowest. Generally there is a fairly similar patternfor all with no clear cross-over for the wholist-verbalisers and -imagers.

Differences between high and low cognitive skills. In order to facilitate aconsideration of the effect of cognitive skill, Fig. 2 shows the differences inperformance between the high and low levels of cognitive skill for the fivesubjects.

Difference = (performance by high skill group — performance by low skill group)

An inspection of Fig. 2 indicates the following.

(1) Analytic-verbalisers show the least difference between the high and lowcognitive skills groups, maybe because this style is most naturally suitedto academic work and they do not develop as many strategies as do theother styles, whose natural mode is less suited.

(2) The greatest difference occurs in the case of the analytic-imagers,except for French, which was their best subject in the low cognitiveskill condition. This is not a ceiling effect as is evidenced by theanalytic-verbalisers who show a difference less than that of the otherstyles.

(3) The cross-over in performance with subject by the wholist-verbalisersand the wholist-imagers is observed here, with the wholist-verbalisersshowing the greater difference in their least best subjects of mathematicsand geography and the wholist-imagers having the greater difference inEnglish and French in which they were least naturally strong.

Hence, the greatest difference due to cognitive skill appears in situationswhere the natural style results in the lowest performance—the overall subjects

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322 R. Riding & T. Agrell

differences (high minus low cognitive skill) were analytic-verbalisers 4.69,wholist-verbalisers 13.53, wholist-imagers 13.39 and analytic-imagers 16.36.

Cognitive skill/intelligence appears to turn the least appropriate style intothe most appropriate! The most likely explanation of this is in terms of strategydevelopment.

Where the style is naturally inappropriate to schoolwork and when theindividual is intelligent, strategies are likely to be developed to maximise theeffectiveness of the style (cf. Riding & Read, 1996, pp. 101-102). The moreintelligent students will probably work these out for themselves, while the lessintelligent ones will need help but may be trained to develop strategies.

In contrast, where the styles are naturally appropriate, there will be littleincentive to develop strategies since the styles can usually cope to a reasonableextent.

A further consideration is that, for maximum effectiveness in academicwork, in its fullest creative sense, style dimensions that complement one another,as is the case with wholist-verbalisers and analytic-imagers, are an advantage.These provide both an overall view and an analytic facility, in contrast to theanalytic-verbalisers and the wholist-imagers who cannot obtain both. Whenadded to intelligence, the wholist-verbalisers with their verbal bias do well.

In an individual, their performance may be improved by the developmentof strategies which maximise the positive aspects of each style dimension. Animportant consideration with respect to style mismatch with a subject's contentor presentation mode is that it should not be a passive acceptance of thedifficulty, but a challenge to find strategies by which an inappropriate style maybe used to its best advantage in order to facilitate the learning performance.Intelligent students will be better at doing this than less intelligent ones, althoughboth could probably be helped by a programme of strategy development. Thearea of strategy development and style deserves further investigation.

NOTE

[1] The North American version of the Cognitive Styles Analysis was used.

REFERENCES

CANADIAN TEST CENTRE (1992a) Canadian Test of Cognitive Skills: level 4 (Markham, Ontario,Canadian Test Centre).

CANADIAN TEST CENTRE (1992b) Canadian Test of Cognitive Skills: examiners manual (Markham,Ontario, Canadian Test Centre).

DOUGLAS, G. & RIDING, R.J. (1993) The effect of pupil cognitive style and position of prosepassage title on recall, Educational Psychology, 13, pp. 385-393.

ELLIOT, C. (1983) The British Ability Scales (Windsor, NFER).RIDING, R.J. (1991) Cognitive Styles Analysis (Birmingham, Learning and Training Technology).RIDING, R.J. (1996) Learning Styles and Technology-based Training (Sheffield, Department for

Education and Employment).RIDING, R.J. (1997) On the nature of cognitive style, Educational Psychology, 17, pp. 29-49.

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Effect of Cognitive Style and Cognitive Skills 323

RIDING, R.J. & ANSTEY, L. (1982) Verbal-Imagery learning style and reading attainment in eight-year-old children, Journal of Research in Reading, 5, pp. 57-66.

RIDING, R.J. & ASHMORE, J. (1980) Verbaliser-Imager learning style and children's recall ofinformation presented in pictorial versus written form, Educational Studies, 6, pp. 141-145.

RIDING, R.J. & CALVEY, I. (1981) The assessment of verbal-imagery learning styles and theireffect on the recall of concrete and abstract prose passages by eleven-year-old children, BritishJournal of Psychology, 72, pp. 59-64.

RIDING, R.J. & CHEEMA, I. (1991) Cognitive styles—an overview and integration, EducationalPsychology, 11, pp. 193-215.

RIDING, R.J. & DOUGLAS, G. (1993) The effect of cognitive style and mode of presentation onlearning performance, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 63, pp. 297-307.

RIDING, R.J. & PEARSON, F. (1994) The relationship between cognitive style and intelligence,Educational Psychology, 14, pp. 413-425.

RIDING, R.J. & READ, G. (1996) Cognitive style and pupil learning preferences, EducationalPsychology, 16, pp. 81-106.

RIDING, R.J. & SADLER-SMITH, E. (1992) Type of instructional material, cognitive style andlearning performance, Educational Studies, 18, pp. 323-340.

RIDING, R.J. & WATTS, M. (1997) The effect of cognitive style on the preferred format ofinstructional material, Educational Psychology, 17, pp. 179-183.

RIDING, R.J., GLASS, A., BUTLER, S.R. & PLEYDELL-PEARCE, C.W. (1997) Cognitive style andindividual differences in EEG alpha during information processing, Educational Psychology,17, pp. 219-234.

SKAALVIK, E.M. & RANKIN, R.J. (1994) Gender differences in mathematics and verbal achieve-ment, self-perception and motivation, British Journal of Educational Psychology, 64,pp. 419-428.

TENNANT, M. (1997) Psychology and Adult Learning (London, Routledge).WECHSLER, D. (1974) Manual for the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children—revised (New York,

The Psychological Corporation).

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