The Implications of Cognitive Style to Adult Distance Education

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the implications of the cognitive-style dimension of field independence/dependence for adult learners in distance learning environments. Chinien and Boutin (1992–93) suggest a student’s repertoire of cognitive skills can serve to facilitate or debilitate a student’s performance in a learning task. Cognitive skills also determine if a student performs cognitive tasks in a self-directed or independent manner. The cognitive style dimension of field independence/dependence refers to a student’s manner of processing information on a continuum between globally or analytically. The implications of this construct on learner achievement depends on three elements: (a) the nature of the learning task; (b) the effectiveness of the teacher in adapting the learning material to suit the learner; and (c) the capacity in assisting the learner to adapt to different learning requirements (Witkin et al., 1977). Psychologists doing research on perception were interested in the phenomena of army pilots during the Second World War flying into fog and emerging upside down, when others emerged right side up. Research revealed that some people perceived themselves as separate from their environment, while others perceived themselves as embedded in their environment (Kirby, 1979). The pencil-and-paper test used to measure this same perceptual construct is the hidden-figures test (HFT) (Ekstrom et al., 1976). The HFT requires a subject to disembed thirty-two separate figures from complex figures in twenty-four minutes. A subject’s ability to successfully disembed the hidden figures is correlated to his or her level of field independence (Witkin et al., 1977). The HFT has a reliability of r = .72 (Fleishman & Dusek, 1971) and its validity is established on many levels. The flexibility of closure test (HFT) is a valid tool for both genders (Beard, 1965) and it is also valid across different cultures (El-Abd, 1970; Irvine, 1969). The HFT has predictive validity (Hettema, 1968), is sufficiently generalizable (Messick & French, 1975) and measures cognitive ability (Mos, Wardell & Royce, 1974). Pemberton (1952) tested for the HFT’s validity to measure analytical ability and found it to be valid, and Sack and Rice (1974) found the HFT to be sufficiently discriminatory. The HFT measures a subject’s ability to restructure, which also includes their ability to break up an organized field so that a discreet background is separate from