| Abstract: |
Considerable attention has been devoted to cognitive styles since the
beginning of the previous century. Cognitive styles are extensively studied in
diverse research domains. This large interest led to a wide diversity of
cognitive style theories and studies. The development of the cognitive style
field shows some similarity with the story of the ‘blind men and the
elephant’, with researchers tending to study only one part of the whole, but
none with full understanding. The aim of this article is to build further on
previous suggestions for the advancement of the cognitive style field by
focusing on six relevant, critical issues in the area of the theory, the
measurement, and the practical relevance of cognitive styles: (1) the need for
conceptual clarification to situate cognitive styles in the individual
differences field, (2) the need for an overarching, contextualized individual
differences model, (3) towards longitudinal, contextual research designs to
find the origins of cognitive style, (4) the search for the fundamental
cognitive style dimensions in the myriad of cognitive style models, (5) an
evolution from self-report questionnaires to multi-source, multi-method
approaches, and (6) bridging the relevance gap by different approaches of
knowledge creation and knowledge dissemination. On the basis of an overview of
past and present cognitive style research, we purport to suggest an agenda for
future research in the field of cognitive styles. Ideally, cognitive style
research evolves towards a ‘pragmatic science’, which combines high
theoretical rigour with high practical relevance. |