Cognitive Styles: an integrated model

Abstract Cognitive styles are potentially useful in education as a means of characterizing stable individual differences that influence the effectiveness of teaching and learning. However, anyone interested in using styles in either research or practice is faced with a literature that is not only disorganized but also dated. Little basic research is being done to clarify the conceptual and measurement problems that bedevil the field. One way to revive interest in basic research would be to link ‘traditional’ conceptions of cognitive styles with the more vigorous field of cognitive psychology. This might result in new ways of conceptualizing individual styles, as well as resolving the problem of the relationships between styles. In this paper, I take a step in this direction by integrating some of the more common conceptions of cognitive styles into an information processing model of cognition.