Describe selected faculty and students according to their selected demographic variables;

2) Determine the cognitive style, student stress, student motivation, and student

engagement of undergraduate students; 3) Determine the cognitive style gap between

faculty and students and to explore its relationship with student stress, student motivation,

student engagement and specific demographic variables of undergraduate students; 4)

Explain undergraduate student stress and student motivation based on cognitive style gap

and selected student demographic variables and 5) Explain undergraduate student

engagement based on cognitive style gap, student stress, student motivation and selected

student demographic variables.

 Research Design

 The researcher used an ex post facto design one (Ary, Jacobs & Razavieh, 2002)

to accomplish the objectives of the study. This design allows for the control and measure

of the independent variable(s) to test hypotheses concerning variation in the dependent

variable(s). Cognitive style is inherent, stable, and measurable as an interval score along a

continuum allowing for the precise measure of dissimilarity between two individual's

cognitive styles. The literature gave little guidance concerning A-I theory's application to

the context of the undergraduate classroom concerning relationships with dependent

variables. Thus, this empirical design was deemed most appropriate.

 For objective one, student demographic variables were measured with items in the

National Survey of Student Engagement 2005 (NSSE) (Kuh, Hayek, Carini, Ouimet,

Gonyea & Kennedy, 2001) and included: age, gender, major, college classification, full-

time status, and number of classes taken with similar content as the class. Lastly, students

were asked to give the number of problem sets that had taken more than an hour to

complete during a typical week. This question was not used in data analysis, but was used