An International Meeting of the American Accounting Association 2005 Annual Meeting August 7–10, 2005 San Francisco, California Come to the City by the Bay!

Effective Learning Strategies Forum
Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Session 14
Teaching Students How to Find and Use their Own Cognitive Styles to Help Build More Effective Teams

Presenter:
John Karayan, California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Description:
Faculty will be shown how to help students build better teams by using the author's website at http://www.csupomona.edu/~jekarayan/brain/brain to self-assess their own cognitive styles. People tend to have preferred approaches—known as cognitive styles—for information gathering and processing. Student awareness of their preferences, and that of others, can be very helpful in team building. For example, when faced with a need to innovate, it usually is better to draw on a team with diverse cognitive styles. This is because people with different styles are more likely to investigate a wider range of approaches to respond to a challenge.

Students who form heterogeneous groups (comprised of students with different preferences) often are able to come up with insights that individuals (or homogeneous groups) miss. On the other hand, if the task is merely implementing an approach, homogeneous groups tend to work better. Cognitive styles awareness also can help reduce conflict in a diverse environment—such as a introductory accounting course required of all business majors—for it reinforces the idea that people can draw different conclusions because of the ways they like to approach fact finding and analysis, and not for "bad" reasons.

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