Cognitive Styles of Secondary Level School Teachers of Mathematics

The change in human society is an indispensable phenomenon and to maintain pace with this change in society as a whole the most appropriate medium is education. Cognitive styles have been defined as the way people perceive stimuli and how they use this information to guide their behaviour i.e. thinking, feeling and actions (Hayes and Allinson, 1994). In this paper, an attempt was made to study the cognitive styles of secondary school teachers of mathematics in the Ahmedabad District of Gujarat state. Cognitive styles like thinking, intelligence, perception, remembering, problem-solving, memory, reasoning, etc, affect the teaching and training process. Some of the factors of cognitive styles which are responsible to shape the teacher’s behaviour and teaching style. In the present research sample of 80 secondary school teachers of mathematics from the government, schools were taken through a simple random sampling technique. Cognitive style inventory developed and standardized by Jha, P. K. (2001) was used. To find out the significance of the difference between both groups of teachers the ‘t-test was used. Results showed that there is a significant difference between male and female secondary school teachers of mathematics with reference to systematic, intuitive and split cognitive styles.