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Cognitive style, gender and conduct behaviour in secondary school pupils The tutor group/form teachers of a total of 341 pupils from two schools, A (Year 10, age 14-15 years) and B (Year 11, age 15-16 years), were asked to rate the classroom conduct behaviour of their pupils on a five-point scale from very poor to very good. The cognitive styles of the pupils were assessed by means of the Cognitive Styles Analysis, which indicated their positions on each of two style dimensions, Wholist-Analytic and Verbal-Imagery. There was a significant interaction between gender and the Wholist-Analytic style in their effect on behaviour, with the females behaving better than the males, and the male Wholists being the worst behaved. The findings are discussed in terms of the practical implications for schooling.

The effectiveness of two simple methods of improving the learning of information presented in spoken prose form was compared. The methods were repetition of the prose, and slowing the rate of speaking to half the normal rate. Different groups of high and low learning ability eleven-year-old children received either one or two tape-recorded presentations of a 216 word prose passage at either normal (158 wpm) or slow (79 wpm) speech rate. One week after hearing the passage the children were given a sixteen question recall test. While repetition did not improve recall, slowing the speech produced a substantial and significant (P < 0·001) increase. As expected, the high ability subjects performed better than those of low ability, but there were no significant interactions with type of presentation.