Gender, Listening, and Learning: Enhancing Educational Environments through Cognitive Styles Awareness
John E. Karayan, Rose M. Martin, Richard Hulme

Abstract
The cognitive styles literature suggests that there may be a variety of ways with which students prefer to gathering and processing information. These cognitive styles may also be related to differences in learning preferences. Focusing on one cognitive styles model – Raudsepp – we performed an empirical analysis with students' choice of major and gender as independent variables and Raudsepp’s styles quadrants as the dependent variable. This analysis shows that the average accounting major prefers Raudsepp’s procedural quadrant, and tends to avoid the conceptual quadrant. Other quantitative-type majors prefer the analytical quadrant, and nonquantitative majors prefer the interpersonal quadrant. Women appear to avoid the conceptual quadrant but have a preference for the interpersonal quadrant. Because the procedural quadrant is preferred only by male accounting majors, passive learning pedagogies (e.g., lecture/problem solving), traditionally used in accounting courses, might be a poor match for many students.

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