The deep approach to learning : analytic abstraction and idiosyncratic development

This paper summarises previous research into approaches to learning and studying before reporting a small-scale longitudinal interview study of first-year psychology students’ approaches. This qualitative investigation looked in depth at how students tackled their learning within a single discipline, and created fine-grained categories to describe their approaches. Few students showed marked, overall changes in their learning, although many did make more minor improvements in their skill in carrying out aspects of the approaches. The focus of this paper is on the nature and development of the deep approach. In particular, it considers five students who showed either distinct changes or no development at all. This group is discussed as case studies to explore the influences on, and resistance to, change in study skill. The results are examined in relation to the analytic framework provided, as a general way of describing the deep approach, and to explore why students in this sample showed little obvious progress in developing their approaches during their first year. Introduction The distinction between deep and surface pproaches to learning , together with the category of strategic approach to studying , have been widely used to describe students’ ways of tackling academic tasks. While the original interview studies in this area suggested that an approach was a specific reaction to a task within a particular learning context, subsequent work indicated that students were, to some extent, consistent in their approaches to everyday studying. It was essential to recognise that approaches contained elements of both individual stability and contextual variability. Relative stability allowed inventories to be designed to indicate general ways of working in a particular course at the time the inventory was completed. These instruments have proved successful in allowing the approaches of groups of students to be explored over time and in relation to specific forms of teaching and differing assessment procedures. They have shown general relationships between approaches and both students’ grades and qualitative measures of their learning outcomes (Entwistle et al., 1989; Entwistle, Meyer & Tait, 1991; Marton & Säljö, 1997; Tait, Entwistle & McCune, 1998; Trigwell & Prosser, 1991). The type of results which have been obtained in relation to groups of students can be illustrated by the factor analysis of a recent inventory – ASSIST (Entwistle, Tait and McCune, 2000). Based on sample of 1284 first-year students from three long established and three recently established British universities covering a spread of areas of study, Table 1 shows the relationships between the subscales of the inventory, and also suggests links with preferences for teaching and self-ratings of academic performance. The factor structure of the inventory is clear-cut and has been confirmed with other samples and at different levels of performance. These factors, and the aspects of studying they have been designed to tap, then provided well-established analytic categories for describing general tendencies in studying and their correlates. Factor analysis describes the relationships between variables in ways which show the broad overall pattern clearly, but cannot identify different patterns of relationship which may exist in sub-groups within a population (Meyer, 2000).