The aim of the thesis was to study how cognitive styles influence decision-making. From structural point of view, the thesis is divided into two parts. In the introductory theoretical part we point at decision-making, its definition and theory, and then we deal with structure and factors which influence decision-making, as well as rules for decision-making and decision errors. In theoretical part we concentrate on cognitive styles. We define cognitive styles and present their possible classifications to a reader, at the same time we focus on few of them in detail. Thereafter we concentrate on relation between cognitive styles and decision-making. In conclusion of theoretical part we focus on adolescence, we describe specific of cognitive and emotional development, as well as adolescents' decision-making. The aim of empirical part was to find out whether decision errors occur in decision-making between older adolescents and to what extent, and how intervening variable influences them - cognitive style reflexivity-impulsivity, gender, and attended secondary school. Research consisted of 184 secondary school graduates from three secondary schools in Senica. Test TE- NA-TO was used for exploration of cognitive styles. At the same time we studied framing effect and anchoring and adjustment effect...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between cognitive load and cognitive style and explore the role cognitive load and cognitive style play in the achievement of learning outcomes, when using animation and static images as multimedia learning formats in an authentic learning environment. Two hundred and forty five 2nd year medical and dental students participated in the main study. The majority of the participants had a Analytic style on the Wholistic-Analytic dimension and an Imager style on the Verbaliser-Imager dimension. It is not clear from the literature whether this is a typical cognitive style profile for health education learners. Cognitive load was measured using a subjective rating technique. The cognitive loads of the respective research interventions were significantly different, yet neither version appeared to have an excessive cognitive load that negatively influenced learning. Significant learning took place for all the participants in this study. Surprisingly it was found that when the program was considered as a whole the version that used predominantly animation had the lower cognitive load. When the analysis drilled down to specific screens and compared animation and static images and text the results consistently showed that animation had a higher cognitive load than static images and text. This study established that there is empirical evidence that cognitive load influences learning performance. There are indicators that the Analytic cognitive style influences the subjective rating of cognitive load. Further empirical investigation of this relationship is necessary. The proposal is that the Analytic style influences the germane load experienced during learning. Since researchers are currently unable to measure the three different types of load separately this proposal remains an area for further investigation. The subjective cognitive load rating of the program was compared with the cognitive load rating measured using the direct measurement method. The direct measurement method found that the animation version had the higher cognitive load. The correlation between these two methods of measurement was very low and not significant, thereby confirming a suggestion in recent literature that each method might be measuring different aspects of cognitive load. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2008. / Curriculum Studies / unrestricted

This study explores whether final year university students possess entrepreneurial intention and which factors determine such a career choice. A quantitative study of 228 fourth year undergraduate students from the University of Botswana was undertaken to investigate the relationship between entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial self-efficacy and whether this is influenced by internal and environmental factors. This study offers empirical proof that entrepreneurial interests lead to entrepreneurial intent when students posses entrepreneurial self-efficacy. Students with a creative cognitive style show strong entrepreneurial intent irrespective of the level of self-concept. It is suggested that environmental factors do not have a significant influence on the decision to pursue self-employment. / Dissertation (MBA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) / unrestricted

With the development of the times, games, which is the basis of entertainment medium, has gradually become the tool of learning for human beings and finally promote the development of serious games. As we know that the interactive experience and aesthetic experience of games are all obtained from game icons. As the communication bridge between players and games, the functional game icons in serious games have evolved from single symbols to diversified styles icons.  With the experiment method like semantic differential and similarity computation, this paper has acquired functional icons of high matching quality and recreated them with emotional design. The case study presented in this thesis demonstrated that in a multitude of serious games, functional icons had suffered the problems of lack of interaction and difference, unbalanced unity and high similarity through comparing the cognitive level experiment of different style icons and the preference experiment of different cognitive styles. This case studies the cognition of functional icons and the types of icons preferred by different cognitive styles. In addition, different styles of functional icons have different cognitive effects, while different cognitive styles have different cognitive functions and preferences. In this case, it was found that the cognitive ergonomics of different styles of functional icons differed. For users familiar with the game, the cognitive ergonomics of flat icons were higher than that of anthropomorphic icons. The cognitive ergonomics of icons with low abstraction level was higher than that of icons with high abstraction level. Meanwhile, the cognitive efficacy and preference of different cognitive styles for different styles of functional icons are different and it is more obvious that intuiting cognitive style users prefer anthropomorphic icons. Sequential cognitive style users have higher cognitive efficacy for anthropomorphic icons than flat icons. The global cognitive style users prefer anthropomorphic icons for icons with high abstraction levels. Therefore, the design of functional icons for serious games should consider the difference in users' cognitive styles because cognitive styles can be used as an entry point for the balance between the serious part and the game part of serious games. Personalized icon design can be designed for different cognitive styles users by combining their preferences for icons, so as to increase users' interest in serious games. The symbolic icons can also be used to let players quickly understand the meaning of the game, so as to improve the learning efficiency of serious games for people with different cognitive styles. / <p>Det finns övrigt digitalt material (t.ex. film-, bild- eller ljudfiler) eller modeller/artefakter tillhörande examensarbetet som ska skickas till arkivet. / There are other digital material (eg film, image or audio files) or models/artifacts that belongs to the thesis and need to be archived. </p>

The purpose of this study was to examine the means of scores on three forms of a standardized reading comprehension test taken by community college students in developmental reading classes. The three forms of the test were administered as a timed multiple-choice test, a constructed response test, and an un-timed multiple-choice test. Scores on the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT) were used to classify the students who participated in the study as having field dependent (LOW GEFT), mid-field dependent/independent (MID GEFT), or fieldindependent (HIGH GEFT) tendencies. The paired samples test was used to analyze the scores among the students classified as LOW GEFT, MID GEFT, and HIGH GEFT for mean differences in scores on the three test formats. The data revealed that for LOW GEFT students, the format of the test impacted their scores, with the mean of the scores of the un-timed multiple-choice test being significantly higher than the timed multiple-choice test and the constructed response format. The data also showed that for the MID GEFT students the mean of the scores for the un-timed multiple-choice test was significantly higher than the means for the timed multiple-choice test scores and the constructed response test scores. However, no significant mean difference was found between the timed multiple-choice test scores and the constructed response test scores. For the HIGH GEFT students, significant mean difference existed only between the un-timed multiple-choice and the timed multiple choice scores. The means of reading comprehension test scores on the three formats between the LOW GEFT, MID GEFT, and HIGH GEFT students indicated significant mean difference between the timed multiple choice test scores but not between the means of the scores for the constructed response and the un-timed multiple-choice test scores. Demographically, when the means of the reading test scores were analyzed with ethnicity as the controlling variable, the Hispanic students had a significantly higher mean on the scores for the constructed response test format. No other significant mean differences were found between the scores of the African American, Caucasian, Hispanic, or Native American students. When the means of the reading test scores were analyzed with gender as the controlling variable, no significant mean difference was found between the reading comprehension scores of the men and women. This study indicated that cognitive style had more impact on students’ performance on a standardized test of reading comprehension than did ethnicity or gender. The un-timed multiple-choice format also had an equalizing effect on the means of the scores for these students.

This study was designed to examine whether a person's prepositioned cognitive style influenced learning achievement in a visually-oriented task for an online learning environment in higher education. Field dependence-independence was used to identify individuals' cognitive styles. A true experimental study was conducted in the fall 2005 term at the University of Central Florida. This researcher followed Dwyer and Moore's research (1991, 2002) and divided learners into three groups (field dependent [FD], field neutral [FN], and the field independent [FI] students). Eighty-three preservice teachers participated in this study; the data from 52 of the FD and the FI participants were analyzed to answer research questions. The findings in this study supported those in the literature review; students from both FD and FI cognitive styles performed equally well in online learning environments. In addition, for providing introductory-level instruction on visually-oriented tasks in an online learning environment, instructions which emphasized an FD approach benefited both FI and FD students in their knowledge-based learning achievement. In this approach, extra cues and sequence of content might have been the reasons that students had higher scores on their knowledge-based learning achievement and satisfaction levels. The findings of this study also indicated that students could demonstrate higher performance-based learning achievement if they had more experiences on the subject matter and higher knowledge-based learning achievement if they felt the instructions were easy to follow and the workload of the module was manageable. Based on the findings and conclusions, the recommendations are: (1) A larger sample size is needed to generalize the findings of the study; (2) In this study, student-to-student and teacher-to-student interactions might affect students' learning achievement. Future studies should consider those interactions as factors and examine their effect on students' learning achievement.

The purpose of this study was to explore leadership effectiveness from the perspectives of the Full Range Leadership Model and Cognitive Style Theory within the framework of understanding both followers and leaders as individual¿s attitudes to leadership effectiveness. Leadership effectiveness was measured using newly developed self-report instrument, the Leadership Effectiveness Questionnaire (LEQ) with three scales of effectiveness as suggested by Yukl (2002), which were: 1) aims, 2) followers¿ attitude towards the leader and, 3) group processes. The Full Range leadership approaches were measured using Bass & Avolio¿s (1997) Multifactor Leadership Questionnaire (MLQ) Form 5X-Short, whilst cognitive style was gathered by using Allinson & Hayes¿s (1996) Cognitive Style Index (CSI). A two stage (questionnaire survey followed by semi structured interviews) mixed method study was undertaken. Questionnaire data was gathered from 331 followers and 172 leaders in Malaysian Government-Linked Companies, and 10 leaders involved in the interviews. Findings from the survey suggest that a transformational approach was correlated significantly and positively with effectiveness. Intuitive Cognitive Style also correlated significantly with leadership effectiveness. Findings from the semistructured interviews identified a few more characteristics of an effective leadership such as balance and appreciative, whilst new dimensions of cognitive style identified such as rational and holistic. / Ministry of Higher Education (MOHE) Malaysia; and Universiti Malaysia Sarawak (Unimas).

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No / Prior research has shown that individual differences in users' cognitive style and gender can have a significant effect on their usage and perceived usefulness of management information systems. We argue that these differences may also extend to computer-mediated knowledge management systems (KMS), although previous research has not tested this empirically. Where employees are expected to use KMS for acquiring and sharing knowledge, we posit that some will gain more benefit than others, due to their innate personal characteristics, specifically gender and cognitive style. Based on a sample of 212 software developers in one large IS organization, we re-open these dormant debates about the effects of cognitive style and gender on technology usage. The paper contains four main findings. First, we present support for the proposition that cognitive style has an impact on KMS usage, although not for all components of the system. Second, that gender significantly affects KMS usage, with males being more likely to use such systems than females. Third, we find a small interaction effect between cognitive style and gender, but only for the use of data mining. Finally, the data suggest that there is a strong association between KMS usage levels and perceived usefulness. We conclude that if organizations do not recognize the inherent diversity of the workforce, and accommodate gender and cognitive style differences into their knowledge management strategies, they may be likely to propagate an intrinsic disadvantage, to the detriment of females and intuitive thinkers.