CULTURALLY RESPONSIVE INSTRUCTION AND COGNITIVE STYLE: A QUASI-EXPERIMENTAL ANALYSIS OF DIFFERENTIAL ACHIEVEMENT GAINS AMONG FIELD-DEPENDENT AND FIELD-INDEPENDENT ECOLOGY STUDENTS IN ABUJA, NIGERIA

Indigenous-knowledge-infused (“ethno-science”) instruction is widely reported to raise science achievement, yet almost no study has asked whether this benefit is distributed evenly across learners with different cognitive styles. This study addressed that gap by examining whether an Ethno-science Teaching Strategy (ETS) interacts with the field-dependent (FD)–field-independent (FI) cognitive-style dimension in shaping achievement in secondary school Ecology. A quasi-experimental, pretest–posttest, non-equivalent control-group design was employed with 157 Senior Secondary Two Biology students (82 experimental, 75 control) drawn from four public schools in the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Nigeria, using a two-stage purposive-then-random sampling procedure. Cognitive style was classified using an embedded-figures instrument, and achievement was measured with a 40-item Ecology Achievement Test administered before and after instruction. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), controlling for pretest scores, showed that ETS produced significantly greater achievement gains than conventional lecturing for both FD students, F(1, 77) = 227.08, p < .001, and FI students, F(1, 74) = 400.73, p < .001. Critically, a significant Strategy × Cognitive-Style interaction emerged, F(1, 152) = 5.88, p = .016: FI students gained 15.18 points under ETS versus 13.22 points for FD students, a gap nearly four times larger than the corresponding gap under conventional teaching (0.56 points). No significant gender differences in achievement were found within either cognitive-style group. The findings suggest that culturally responsive pedagogy raises the achievement floor for all learners while simultaneously widening, rather than closing, an analytic-processing advantage already documented for field-independent learners, with direct implications for differentiated assessment design.