This book aims to mark fifteen years of contributions to the field of style research in cognition and learning presented at the annual conference of the European Learning Styles Information Network. The style field is a multidisciplinary, global community made up of researchers in several domains of knowledge including education, psychology, business, computer science, information systems, management, human resources and other related fields. The book will be relevant for readers who are interested in differences in thinking and learning, covering a wide range of style-related themes with appeal to readers seeking an international and interdisciplinary perspective. Interested practitioners will include professionals working in the areas of HR Management, Organizational Learning, Business Management and all phases of Education. The application of style differences, for example, impacts widely upon work and human performance in areas of policy-making, team-management and project development (sports, social agency, and medicine). New or alternative research paradigms facilitating revision and consensus in the field of style differences are presented. The aim of integrating research and practice is developed to achieve consensual theory for style differences in human performance. Style Differences in Performance is a timely and field-defining volume that will change the way academics and practitioners across international and disciplinary boundaries think and talk about the field of learning style and its implications for human achievement.

[B]ecause of the thoroughness of the literature reviews and the comprehensive coverage of the chapter topics, [this book] should be required reading for any scholar working in related areas of personality or intelligence."--PsycCRITIQUES "This book is a masterly attempt to bring order and cohesion to a field that for many years has been riven with claims and counterclaims. The editors and authors are to be congratulated for addressing a very complex task so helpfully." John Biggs, PhD Honorary Professor of Psychology University of Hong Kong "If you are interested in intellectual stylesópeople's preferred ways of processing informationóthen this book belongs on your bookshelf." Richard E. Mayer, PhD Professor of Psychology University of California, Santa Barbara "For more than half a century, the construct of styleówhether designated as cognitive, thinking or learningóhas been in or out of fashion in the history of psychology and education. The editors of the present Handbook have invigorated the style construct in the form of intellectual styles, and have brought together a distinguished international panel of chapter authors who offer up-to-date surveys of the assessment, development, correlates, and educational and organizational applications of intellectual styles. For those seeking to familiarize themselves with current theory and research in an intellectually exciting field, the present Handbook is essential." Nathan Kogan, PhD Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology New School for Social Research, New York, NY The concept of intellectual styles has had a controversial history based on diverse philosophical and theoretical foundations. Most recently, the idea of intellectual stylesóan umbrella term that covers such closely related constructs as "cognitive styles," "learning styles," "teaching styles," and "thinking styles"óhas gained momentum as an explanation for why different people succeed in different professional and organizational settings. Previously, it was thought that high-achievers simply had more innate abilities than their less successful peers, but research has shown that individuals have different intellectual styles that are better suited for varying types of contexts and problems. Based on the most current and expansive research, this handbook is the first to provide a comprehensive review of research on the construct of intellectual style, from its foundations and development, to its relations to allied constructs, its roles in school and job performance, its applications in various populations, and its future.. This understanding of intellectual styles as a valid concept for both individuals and groups has far-reaching implications for researchers in cross-cultural psychology, multicultural education, organizational behavior and work performance, and many other academic disciplines, as well as practitioners in education and beyond. Key Features: Provides a comprehensive review of intellectual styles from multiple perspectives Written for students and scholars in diverse academic arenas, as well as practitioners in education and other fields Includes contributions from researchers from diverse disciplines, such as psychology, business, education, and health sciences

Edwin Hutchins combines his background as an anthropologist and an open ocean racing sailor and navigator in this account of how anthropological methods can be combined with cognitive theory to produce a new reading of cognitive science. His theoretical insights are grounded in an extended analysis of ship navigation—its computational basis, its historical roots, its social organization, and the details of its implementation in actual practice aboard large ships. The result is an unusual interdisciplinary approach to cognition in culturally constituted activities outside the laboratory—"in the wild." Hutchins examines a set of phenomena that have fallen in the cracks between the established disciplines of psychology and anthropology, bringing to light a new set of relationships between culture and cognition. The standard view is that culture affects the cognition of individuals. Hutchins argues instead that cultural activity systems have cognitive properties of their own that are different from the cognitive properties of the individuals who participate in them. Each action for bringing a large naval vessel into port, for example, is informed by culture: the navigation team can be seen as a cognitive and computational system. Introducing Navy life and work on the bridge, Hutchins makes a clear distinction between the cognitive properties of an individual and the cognitive properties of a system. In striking contrast to the usual laboratory tasks of research in cognitive science, he applies the principal metaphor of cognitive science—cognition as computation (adopting David Marr's paradigm)—to the navigation task. After comparing modern Western navigation with the method practiced in Micronesia, Hutchins explores the computational and cognitive properties of systems that are larger than an individual. He then turns to an analysis of learning or change in the organization of cognitive systems at several scales. Hutchins's conclusion illustrates the costs of ignoring the cultural nature of cognition, pointing to the ways in which contemporary cognitive science can be transformed by new meanings and interpretations. A Bradford Book

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Hybrid Learning, ICHL 2012, held in Guangzhou, China, in August 2012. The 32 contributions presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. In addition two keynote talks are included in this book. The topics covered are computer supported collaborative learning, experiences in hybrid learning, electronic learning, pedagogical and psychological issues, hybrid learning systems, and organizational frameworks for hybrid learning.

Wide aspects of a university education address design: the conceptualization, planning and implementation of man-made artifacts. All areas of engineering, parts of computer science and of course architecture and industrial design all claim to teach design. Yet the education of design tends ot follow tacit practices, without explicit assumptions, goals and processes. This book is premised on the belief that design education based on a cognitive science approach can lead to significant improvements in the effectiveness of university design courses and to the future capabilities of practicing designers. This applies to all professional areas of design. The book grew out of publications and a workshop focusing on design education. This volume attempts to outline a framework upon which new efforts in design education might be based. The book includes chapters dealing with six broad aspects of the study of design education: • Methodologies for undertaking studies of design learning • Longitudinal assessment of design learning • Methods and cases for assessing beginners, experts and special populations • Studies of important component processes • Structure of design knowledge • Design cognition in the classroom

The educational use of television, film, and related media has increased significantly in recent years, but our fundamental understanding of how media communicate information and which instructional purposes they best serve has grown very little. In this book, the author advances an empirically based theory relating media's most basic mode of presentation -- their symbol systems -- to common thought processes and to learning. Drawing on research in semiotics, cognition and cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and mass communication, the author offers a number of propositions concerning the particular kinds of mental processes required by, and the specific mental skills enhanced by, different symbol systems. He then describes a series of controlled experiments and field and cross-cultural studies designed to test these propositions. Based primarily on the symbol system elements of television and film, these studies illustrate under what circumstances and with what types of learners certain kinds of learning and mental skill development occur. These findings are incorporated into a general scheme of reciprocal interactions among symbol systems, learners' cognitions, and their mental activities; and the implications of these relationships for the design and use of instructional materials are explored.

The first volume in the series considers cognitive style, which may well prove to be the missing link in the study of individual differences. The purpose of the book is to reflect academic debate focusing on key models of style.

A classic book about language acquisition and conceptual structure, with a new preface by the author, "The Secret Life of Verbs." Before Steven Pinker wrote bestsellers on language and human nature, he wrote several technical monographs on language acquisition that have become classics in cognitive science. Learnability and Cognition, first published in 1989, brought together two big topics: how do children learn their mother tongue, and how does the mind represent basic categories of meaning such as space, time, causality, agency, and goals? The stage for this synthesis was set by the fact that when children learn a language, they come to make surprisingly subtle distinctions: pour water into the glass and fill the glass with water sound natural, but pour the glass with water and fill water into the glass sound odd. How can this happen, given that children are not reliably corrected for uttering odd sentences, and they don't just parrot back the correct ones they hear from their parents? Pinker resolves this paradox with a theory of how children acquire the meaning and uses of verbs, and explores that theory's implications for language, thought, and the relationship between them. As Pinker writes in a new preface, "The Secret Life of Verbs," the phenomena and ideas he explored in this book inspired his 2007 bestseller The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature. These technical discussions, he notes, provide insight not just into language acquisition but into literary metaphor, scientific understanding, political discourse, and even the conceptions of sexuality that go into obscenity.