Relationships between User Cognitive Styles and Browsing Behaviors of an Online Learning Web Site

This study investigated the relationships between learner cognitive styles and how learners interact with a web-based learning system. The cognitive style model investigated in this study was based on two independent fundamental cognitive functions, perception and judgment, whose combinations form four cognitive styles, Interpersonal, Mastery, Understanding, and Self-Expressive. Selection behavior of components and average staying time of web pages were investigated. The experimental results showed that both average selection ratio and average staying time had similar trends which revealed that if learners preferred a component, they not only selected it more frequently but also stayed at it longer. The experimental results also revealed that there were significant differences in browsing behaviors among different cognitive style learners. Each style learners had their own "preferred" and "disliked" components which were different from other style learners. Furthermore, the experimental results revealed that Interpersonal and Mastery learners, who share "sensing" of the cognitive function "perception", stayed much longer on web pages during the last 5 minutes. Findings of this study should be able to offer important guidelines to incorporate learner cognitive styles into adaptive web-based systems by presenting various kinds of content and interactive components Of learning materials in web-based environments.