Interaction of Personality Variables with Inductive and Deductive Teaching Strategies

Abstract

Male and female Students were separately classified as high or low in intelligence and high or low in anxiety. Students from each of these four categories were then randomly assigned to work through either an inductive or a deductive self instructional programme on Enzyme Kineties. A 2 x 2 x 2 analysis of variance design was then used to analyse the results for males using gain score, errors on the programmes and time as the dependent variables. Female results were then treated similarly. Significant main effects and interaction effects were found for females but not for males. Although this may be due to sex differences replication with larger numbers of males is needed to confirm these findings. The major result for females was that the amount of successful learning by different types of female depends on the difficulty of the learning situation. High anxious females achieve higher gain scores after learning by deduction than they do after learning by induction. This may be attributable to the increase in task irrelevant responses emitted by high anxious females in difficult learning situations, where the probability of making errors is higher than in easy learning situations. On the other hand low anxious females are relatively higher in need achievement than high anxious females and they achieve higher gain scores after learning by induction than they do after learning by deduction. Possibly this is due to high success probability not being attractive to females with high need achievement. Whereas high intelligent females learn equally well by induction and by deduction, low intelligent females make fewer errors and attain higher gain scores after learning by deduction. High intelligent females take longer to work through both versions of the programmes than low intelligent females. Also females take longer to work through the inductive version of the programme than they do through the deductive version.