This is a preliminary report of a project that is attempting to extend psychological research on stylistic differences in cognition to the study of teaching. This portion of the project measures students' preferences for three modes of mathematical expression; symbolic, verbal, and graphic. One hundred and fifteen junior high school students took a test written to measure preferences for the three modes of mathematical expression. In addition, student scores on the Iowa Test of Basic Skills, Form 1, were obtained. An item analysis was made and correlations made between total scores on each of the three scales and the nine scores from the Iowa Test. The results were that students preferred a symbolic mode of representation and that the verbal and graphic scales formed positively skewed distributions while the symbolic scale formed a relatively symetric though bimodal distribution. Other results are summarized in tabular form. Several suggestions for further experimentation are given. (Author/CT)