Exploring the impact of cognitive style profiles on different learning approaches: Empirical evidence for adopting a person-centered perspective

Abstract

This study aims to clarify whether and how various configurations of three cognitive style dimensions (creating, knowing, and planning) emerge among graduate business students, with differential impacts on their learning approaches. With a person-centered, latent transition analysis of cognitive styles, the authors identify several distinct cognitive style profiles: a moderate cognitive style profile, a dominant creating and knowing style profile, a dominant creating and low planning style profile, and a dominant planning and low creating style profile. The analysis also offers evidence of the trait-like character of these cognitive style profiles, by demonstrating their temporal stability. Furthermore, significant differences arise across profiles in terms of how they relate to different learning approaches (strategic, deep, and surface learning).