Twenty-fifth International Conference on Learning

Abstract

The stylistic standard Field Dependence (FD) has been connected with various aspects of the personality, procedures and strategies used in solving problems or a weighted aggregation of cognitive, affective and motivational aspects, inherent to the information processing and problem solving. The relationship between FD, intelligence and academic performance remains shrouded in controversy. In this study, FD was associated with the written expression of children, one area that reveals great difficulty in information processing. The study included a sample of 92 pupils of 3rd and 4th grade of primary school (45 males; 47 females), aged between 8 and 11 years, and the quality of the writing expression of the students was assessed. Our results show a statistically significant relationship when we associate the results obtained in the test of intelligence and cognitive style with the students’ performance on the test of written expression. This is a classic relation but still incompletely understood. In our study, this observation occurred mainly among students of the fourth grade, and may reflect the emergence of cognitive style in this school/age range. However, the observation of a text effect in the Raven test near the students of 4th year of schooling does not allow us to move forward in this case without a better control of the general intelligence of the students. We conclude, convinced, that we can associate the students’ cognitive skills (factor g, cognitive style), with cognitive and metacognitive processes that can generalize to their learning and academic performance.