A new scientific report looks at the way people learn, experience and think across disciplines and finds that often, cognitive style can prove too narrow or limiting.
Those findings, published in the latest issue of Psychological Science in the Public Interest, could prove enlightening for those working in the fields of business or education. For example, in business and management, cognitive style is usually analytical and intuitive, which can be “overly simplistic,” the study says. Flexibility in how a decision is thought through is key.
“Teaching a student to select the most appropriate style to a given situation among a variety of styles and how to switch styles if necessary is a much more beneficial approach,” said researcher and lead author of the report Maria Kozhevnikov, an associate professor of psychology at the National University of Singapore and associate in Neuroscience at Massachusetts General Hospital.
The report, then, urges flexibility of thought, a skill in which teachers must instruct their students. Here is one apt example from the article:
For instance, when a physics teacher asks students to understand the meaning of kinematics graphs, she or he needs to understand first that the rate-limiting step is spatial processing at a higher-order information-processing level, and that the most appropriate style required for teaching this type of material is a higher-order spatial style (Blazhenkova & Kozhevnikov, 2010; Kozhevnikov et al., 2002). Furthermore, the teacher should understand that although they are not optimal, some students may try to use analytic or verbal strategies to interpret kinematics graphs, and some students (object visualizers with high object but low spatial ability) will be able to easily understand the material only in this way (Kozhevnikov et al., 2002)—but they will be prone to certain types of errors, and the teacher should be ready to correct such errors. (Attempting to present object visualizers with pictorial illustrations that would match their style would be inadvisable, because object imagery actually impairs the understanding of graphs; Hegarty & Kozhevnikov, 1999.)
To read the full report, please follow this link:http://bit.ly/1kELdFI
