CONSISTENT DIFFERENCES IN COGNITIVE STYLES SHOWN FOR QUALITATIVE BIOLOGICAL PROBLEM‐SOLVING

Abstract

S ummary . Three qualitative, unfamiliar problems were designed to explore differences in cognitive styles in a biological context, and were given to 48 first‐year tertiary students. Two components of cognitive style were identified. The first was the students' perception of a problem, categorised into analytic, holist and versatile. The second was the ability of students to integrate a particular problem with their existing knowledge, categorised as high and low level. Overall 42 per cent used a singular analytic style of perception; conversely 8 per cent explained all tasks in a purely holist style, and 50 per cent showed varying ability to use both styles of perception in different problems. When the students' results were individually compared for these two problems, it was found that only four students (8 per cent) changed their style of perception between two similar problems. Overall, the percentages of female and male students using a purely analytic style were approximately equal. A higher percentage of students showed a ‘high’ level of integration for the familiar Graph problem than for the unfamiliar Immunity problem. This suggests that the ability to integrate relates more to the content of the task, than does style of perception.

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