An individual with the verbal-imagery style inclines to represent information during thinking verbally or in mental images, whereas an individual with the wholist-analytic style tends to process information in wholes or parts (Riding & Cheema, 1991). The influences of the two styles on academic achievement has been widely investigated and some empirical results from different contexts are reported (e.g., Ford, 1995; Russell, 1997). According to the existing studies, different dimensions in the model seem to show significant influences on academic performance in some specific learning tasks. Under traditional learning conditions, for example, Russell (1997) examined the effect of learner’s cognitive style on learning performance in a vocational training environment and found that imagers performed better on post-test measures involving naming or identifying location of equipment than verbalizers, whereas Riding and Mathias (1991) found that the performance of the wholists on reading attainment was superior to the verbalizers and declined fairly linearly with increasing imagery style.

However, after examining the relationship between cognitive style and General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) performance in mathematics, English, and French, Riding and Caine (1993) found that those students who were intermediate on both dimensions of cognitive style (e.g., the Wholist-Analytic Intermediate -Verbal-Imagery Intermediates) tended to show the best academic achievement.

The above findings indicate that even its style dimensions could significantly contribute to academic performance the results are often inconsistent. Some relevant results from non-traditional environments also supported this argument. For instance, a study by Atkinson (2004) indicated that, (1) in the Computer-Assisted Learning (CAL) conditions, verbalizers performed the best and achieved the greatest learning benefit, whilst analytics were ranked at the bottom; wholists were second; imagers were third; and (2) analytic-imagers gained the least from the CAL context whilst wholist-imagers gained the most. Similarly, Graff (2005) found that verbalizers visited more pages in the hierarchical architecture, whereas imagers visited more pages in the relational architecture.

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From Weiqiao Fan & Yunfeng He (2011). Intellectual Styles and Academic Achievement. In Zhang, L. F., Sternberg, R. J., & Rayner, S. (Eds.) (2011). Handbook of Intellectual Styles: Preferences in Cognition, Learning, and Thinking. Springer Publishing Company: New York.