student involvement and found that academic involvement, faculty involvement and

student peer group involvement were the largest indicators of enhancing student learning

and personal development of undergraduate students. Koljatic and Kuh (2001) conducted

a study to determine if cooperation among students, active learning, and faculty contact

with students has improved since 1983 and found the degree of student engagement in

these three areas has not improved. Furthermore, 20% of freshman and seniors in

colleges and universities across the nation were identified as disengaged (Kuh, 2003).

Even though the literature has addressed the need for student engagement, it seems that

faculty members' instructional techniques still do not encourage undergraduate students'

classroom engagement. In colleges of agriculture, Whittington (1998) found almost 80%

of faculty members' instructional discourse to be low at cognitive level. Is student

engagement explained by cognitive level, cognitive style, or both? Does cognitive style

gap between faculty members and students matter?

 Problem Statement

 Trends in undergraduate education are moving from teacher-centered classrooms

to student-centered classrooms for the improvement of student engagement (Acharya,

2002). From classroom teaching experiences, most faculty members concur that students

learn differently. This has increased the application of learning styles in the classroom as

faculty members struggle to develop instructional techniques to engage student learning.

Advocating the awareness of differing learning styles is commendable. However, further

implications for education practitioners are limited as studies examining instructional

discourse provided to students in similar learning styles have conflicting results (Smith,

Sekar & Townsend, 2002). Many learning styles measures are psychometrically weak

(Curry, 1990) and offer small explanation to the variance of student achievement