The trend that researchers intensively paid their attention to style studies was somehow related to the cold war. When the former Soviet Union landed the first aircraft on the Moon, the United States was much surprised. Considering competition with Soviet Union, The United States had to think of how to catch up with it. Then, of course, the enhancement of education was seen as one important way. In order to improve the quality of education, researchers began to reflect on various facets of schooling. Effective learning was proposed to be the general target for quality of education.

At the theoretical level, when effective learning is taken into consideration, a question comes out immediately: why is there a difference in academic attainment between different learners? In other words, why can a learner get a higher academic achievement but another person¡¯s attainment may be much lower? Before style studies, people believed that ability was the only factor that would give impacts on learning process and learning attainment. So, one with poorer learning performance should be of lower ability. However, Sternberg and his colleagues (Sternberg, 1997; Sternberg & Zhang, 2001) suggested that differences in ability could only account for about 20% of the variation among students in school performance and 10% of the variation among workers in job performance (Sternberg, 1997, p.8-9). Further on, one may ask: how could a person with same ability have completely different achievement in various subjects? Learning interests/ emotions/ motivations may partially explain this. However, there are people with same interests and abilities but perform very differently. To explain this situation, style researchers suggested that style differences should be one of the factors taken into considerations. Sternberg believed that ability at least could not explain such a fact that one may do very well in a course but very poor in another course (Sternberg, 1997, p.9). So, the area of style studies was aimed at giving an alternative explanation about individual differences in learning attainment.

Sternberg, R. J. (1997). Thinking Styles. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Sternberg, R. J., & Zhang, L. F. (2001). Perspectives on Thinking, Learning and Cognitive Styles. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

(This piece of article is from: Yunfeng He. (2006). Thinking Styles and Academic Achievement of Chinese University Students. Unpublished PhD dissertation. Hong Kong: The University of Hong Kong.)