How Different Cognitive Style Groups Affect Learners’ Knowledge Construction in Collaborative Argumentation

Abstract

The ability of innovation, critical thinking, communication and cooperation are highly emphasized. Knowledge construction has been recognized as a crucial collaborative process contributing to individuals' learning and to high-productivity collaboration. Cognitive style is an important factor that affects the knowledge construction of students. This research aims to explore how the combination of people with different cognitive styles affects students’ collaborative knowledge construction. The intuition-analysis cognitive style classification is used as the basis for grouping. There are eight groups in four different combination which include all-analysts, two intuitivists & one analysts, two analysts & one intuitivist, and all-intuitivists. They were asked to take part in a collaborative argumentation which were recorded for further analysis. The results show that, the group with different cognitive style students performs better than those with same cognitive style members in knowledge construction in the collaborative argumentation. In the group of mixed cognitive styles, the more analytic students, the higher and more logical the entire group’ knowledge construction is. Therefore, it is recommended that teachers adopt the heterogeneous cognitive styles grouping strategy.