Cognitive Style of Pupil Teachers in Relation to Their Cultural Intelligence

As John Dewey said-'School is a miniature form of society'. As India is a diverse country, our schools and colleges have students from culturally diverse backgrounds, and they have different kinds of habitual ways of learning, thinking and remembering information, that is, cognitive style. So, it is very important for teachers to know and understand the cognitive style and have cultural intelligence (CQ) to foster learning, diversity and inclusiveness in classrooms.

The aim of this study is to explore the cognitive styles of pupil teachers in relation to their CQ with reference to gender, stream and family type.

In this study Descriptive Survey method is used to collect and analyse the data accurately. A standard tool on cognitive style and a self-made Likert-scale on CQ were used to collect research data from 100 pupil teachers belonging to different colleges of Kanpur city by using the Random Sampling technique.

The results indicated that both male and female pupil teachers, as well as the pupil teachers living in joint and nuclear families, were found to have cognitive styles to the same extent in relation to their CQ. The cognitive style of arts stream pupil teachers was found to be significantly more from the cognitive style of science stream pupil teachers in relation to their CQ.

The findings urge a major concern towards pupil teachers to focus on Cognitive Style and CQ as it develops reasoning, understanding, patterns of adjustment to foster multicultural interaction that promotes unity in diversity.