As early as 1964, cognitive preference was introduced as a way of describing an individual's preference for applying, relating or questioning information. To determine the role of cognitive preference in the pattern of variables predicting teachers' ratings of students' performance, 44 high school students completed a 61-item cognitive preference test. Teacher ratings were obtained for students' expressive styles, analytic ability, ability to relate ideas and individual initiative. Additional measures of learning style, aptitude and achievement were used in a correlational study (both zero order and step wise) of the pattern of variables best predicting the teacher ratings. The results indicated that cognitive preference was clearly the best predictor of student performance (whether the cognitive preference scores were considered alone or in combination with other widely used measures of learning styles, academic ability, and achievement). This suggests that cognitive preference may be an important individual difference variable in studies focusing on elaborative and semantic processing of information. (JAC)