Further investigating thinking styles and psychosocial development in the Chinese higher education context

a r t i c l e i n f o Much theorization and research have been done independently on thinking styles and psychosocial development. The primary objective of this research was to further investigate the predictive power of thinking styles for psychosocial development through replicating Zhang and He's (in press) study of Chinese university students in Shanghai, mainland China. Data were collected from two Chinese contexts: Nanjing The TSI-R2 is grounded in Sternberg's (1997) theory of mental self-government, while the MPD is rooted in Erikson's (1968) theory of psychosocial development. Hierarchical multiple regression results confirmed Zhang and He's finding that Type I styles (typified by their creativity-generating characteristics) positively contributed to psychosocial development, whereas Type II styles (noted for their norm-favoring features), especially the monarchic and conservative styles, negatively contributed to psychosocial development. Two of the Type III styles (Type III styles may display the characteristics of either Type I or Type II styles, depending on the specific situation) consistently predicted psychosocial development: the external style positively contributed to psychosocial development, whereas the anarchic style did so negatively. Implications of these results are discussed for university students, faculty members, and for university student development educators. For more than seven decades, scholars have been studying the functions of intellectual styles in human performance, including student learning and development (Zhang & Sternberg, 2009). Intellectual styles, a broad term for different labels with the root word " style " such as cognitive styles, learning styles, and thinking styles, refer to people's preferred ways of processing information (Zhang & Sternberg, 2006). These style constructs are conceptually different. Cognitive styles are used to characterize how individuals prefer to cognize information. Learning styles are used to characterize how individuals prefer to learn about information. Thinking styles are used to characterize how individuals prefer to think about the information as they are learning it or after they have already learned it. Nonetheless, these constructs are fundamentally similar in a major way. That is, all of them are different from abilities. An ability refers to what one can do, whereas a style refers to how one prefers to use the abilities one has (Sternberg & Zhang, 2001). It has been widely recognized that intellectual styles are closely related to diverse domains of student life, including academic achievement (Tsagaris, 2007), cognitive development (Zhang, 2002), career development (Morgan, 1997), and personality (Fjell & Walhovd, 2004). In spite of this, …