levels of motivation than students taught by faculty members with a cognitive style close

to the general population mean of 95 (Kirton, 2003).

 To determine if student engagement varied among adaptive faculty members and

innovative faculty members, a one-way ANOVA was conducted to examine significant

differences between an adaptive teacher group, a middle score teacher group and an

innovative teacher group. Using total student engagement as the dependent variable, a

significant difference was found between groups (F=9.61, p=.00). A Bonferroni post-hoc

test was conducted to further examine group differences. Students in the innovative

teacher group had total engagement scores (M=51.22) significantly higher than

engagement scores of students enrolled in the middle score teacher group (M=48.05,

p=.00). However, students in the innovative teacher group did not have significantly

higher engagement scores than students in the adaptive teacher group (M=49.75, p=.17).

These findings indicated that students in these classes taught by innovative faculty

members tended to have higher levels of student engagement, but not significantly higher

than adaptive faculty members.

Discussion for objective two

 Cognitive style was determined by the KAI. Among the classes, all cognitive style

score means were less than ten points away from 95 which indicates that these students

on average were not highly adaptive or highly innovative. That is, these classes on

average had the same cognitive style as the general population mean (Kirton, 2003).

Overall, students' cognitive style mean score was 93.28 (SD= 15.95). Fluctuation of

cognitive mean scores between classes may be attributed to the number of female

students in the class. Kirton (1999) states that the total cognitive style mean score for

females is 90, which is five points lower than the general population mean. In this study,