Concerning the relationship between the reflective-impulsive styles (also referred to as conceptual tempo) and academic achievement, the literature reflected the significant influences on mathematic learning (e.g., Feij, 1976; Navarro, Aguilar, & Alcalde, 1999) and reading or language learning (Stahl, Erickson, & Raymasn, 1986) across cultural backgrounds (e.g., Andrulis & Bush, 1972; Buela-Casal, Carretero-Dios, & De los Santos-Roig, 2000). A major difference between the reflective and impulsive styles is whether or not an individual tends to reflect on alternative solution possibilities in the process of problem-solving. For example, Feij (1976) reported a negative correlation between impulsiveness and grades in statistics. Buela-Casal, Carretero-Dios, and De los Santos-Roig (2000) suggested similar results among a primary school student sample in Spain while Andrulis and Bush’s (1972) study yielded similar findings among an adult sample.

Particularly, many empirical results tended to suggest that individuals with a reflective style showed higher levels of achievement than ones with an impulsive style (e.g., Adejumo, 1979; Margolis, 1977). Adejumo (1979) found 7-year-old children in the reflective and fast-accurate groups were superior in performance on visual-perceptual tasks. Even though the reflective style is often suggested to be superior in influencing various learning performance than is the impulsive style, there is an exception -- a study by Zelniker and Jeffrey (1976), which concluded that, contrary to existing views, impulsive children are not inferior to reflective children in general potential or problem-solving ability. With regard to this finding, Zelniker and Jeffrey (1976) rather argued that the inferior performance of impulsive children frequently reported in the literature may be due to incompatibility between their preferred global-processing strategy and the detail analysis typically required for successful performance.

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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.