Field Independent Participants Research Articles

Expository content area texts, cognitive style and gender: Their effects on reading comprehension

The purpose of this investigation was to determine if cognitive style (field dependence/independence [FD/I]) and gender interact with passage content to affect reading comprehension. Research on FD/I and its relationship to reading‐related and other academic tasks served as the theoretical and empirical basis for the study. While most of the research has centered on the holistic versus analytic processing differences, this study investigates a less‐frequently examined aspect of FD/I: interest in and preferences for social stimuli. The causal‐comparative study involved two levels of two independent variables: gender and FD/I (field dependent [FD] and field independent [FI]) as determined by the Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT). Comprehension scores on social content and non‐social content expository passages served as dependent measures. Participants were juniors and seniors (n=90) from a large metropolitan university. Using analysis of variance, no significant differences by gender or FD/I were found when the content of the passages was of a social nature. However, when the content focused on non‐social topics, male and field independent participants performed significantly better than female or field dependent participants. Discussion focuses on the possible roles of schema, schema utilization, and reading interests in these findings. Recommendations include extending this study to a wider FD/T range of participants and examining various reading comprehension measures for passage content. Further, field dependent readers may benefit from instruction in recognizing and adjusting for influences of their interests or preferences on reading comprehension and from strategies to increase and maintain comprehension control.

Using Common Region in Node-Link Displays: The Role of Field Dependence/Independence

The role common region plays in acquiring scientific information from node-link displays was investigated. Common region (Palmer, 1992), a relatively new gestalt principle of organization, refers to the phenomena in which objects that share the same perceptually defined area are seen as grouped together. Eighty-eight participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: knowledge maps demonstrating common region or knowledge maps not demonstrating common region. The role of individual differences in field dependence/independence was also assessed. The results indicated that field dependence/independence differentially affects performance for node-link displays that either demonstrate or do not demonstrate common region. The field-dependent participants outperformed the field-independent participants for maps demonstrating common region, whereas the opposite was true for maps not using this principle. The results are interpreted in terms of cognitive effort, and implications for designing node-link displays are discussed.

Individual differences in the cooperative learning of concrete procedures

The effects of selected individual differences on the enactment and recall of a medical procedure, learned in cooperative dyads, were explored. The individual differences of interest were vocabulary level and field-dependence/ independence. One hundred and twenty three college students completed the experiment. During training, participants were randomly assigned to dyads in one of four conditions: (1) no-strategy; (2) baseline strategy; (3) prompting strategy; and (4) planning strategy. During testing, participants both performed and produced written recalls of the procedural instructions. Participants with high vocabulary scores achieved higher recall and performance scores than those with low vocabulary scores. Field-independent students recalled more and performed better than field-dependent students. Various strategies for learning concrete procedures were found to differentially affect the recall and performance of field-dependent and field-independent participants.

Psychological Differentiation and Social Structure

Summary From a sociopsychological theoretical perspective, the present study was designed to explore the interactive effects of personal and social boundaries on emotional reactions. Members of a group dynamics training conference (N = 41 men and women students) were assessed for level of psychological differentiation and then completed self-report questionnaires following participation in small and large self-study groups. Findings showed that the field dependent (i.e., relatively undifferentiated) members, compared to the field independent participants, reacted more adversely in the large and less structured group context and more positively in the small group setting.