ABSTRACT

The study sought to determine the influence of cognitive styles on secondary school students' -T interest and acquisition of science process skills in Chemistry practical in South East, Nigeria. Ten research questions and ten null hypotheses guided the study. The study adopted a descriptive survey research design. A total of 520 SS II Chemistry students drawn from the entire population of 786800 Chemistry SS II students drawn through multi-stage sampling technique made up the sample for the study. Three instruments were used for data collection, the "Group Embedded Figures Test (GEFT)" and "Chemistry Practical Skill Rating Scale (CPSRS)". The third instrument was Chemistry Practical Interest Scale (CPIS) which was developed by the researcher. The instrument was validated by four experts, two experts from Measurement and Evaluation, one from Chemistry Education and one from Psychology all from Michael Okpara University of Agriculture, Umudike. An overall internal consistency reliability estimate of 0.92 was obtained for CPIS. For the clusters, reliability ranging from 1- 5, the internal consistency reliability indices were 0.51, 0.80, 0.68, 0.64 and 0.53 respectively for CPIS. The data collected for the study was analyzed using mean and standard deviations to answer the research questions while t-test and Analysis of variance (ANOVA) statistics were used to test hypotheses formulated for the study at 0.05 level of significance. The findings of the study include: field independent cognitive style had a higher influence than the field dependent cognitive style on acquisition of science process skills and interest in Chemistry practical; cognitive styles of students have significant influence on acquisition of science process skills and interest in chemistry practical; the male students with field independent cognitive style were influenced only slightly more than their female counterparts in the acquisition of science process skills and interest in Chemistry practical and therefore, gender did not have significant influence on students' mean acquisition of science process skill and interest in Chemistry practical based on field independent cognitive style; Students in schools in urban location with field independent cognitive style were influenced only slightly more than their counterparts in the schools located in rural areas in acquisition of science process skill and interest in Chemistry practical and therefore, school location did not have significant influence on students' mean acquisition of science process skill and interest in Chemistry practical based on field independent cognitive style; There was no significant interaction effect of gender as well as school location and cognitive styles on mean acquisition of science process skill and interest in Chemistry practical. Therefore, only the influence of cognitive styles but no other factors like gender and school location affected the students' acquisition of science process skills and interest in Chemistry practical. Among the educational implications was that the study could provide supportive frameworks from which one can assess how the students explore the environment and master the challenges within that environment. It was thus recommended among others that the teacher in preparing to teach does not only bother about how best to teach the content of instruction, but also about the influence of cognitive styles on interest and academic achievement of the students.