Tool 3: Approaches to learning
What are we talking about here?
Approaches to learning describe what students do when they go about learning and why they do it.The basic distinction is between a deep approach to learning, where students are aiming towards understanding, and a surface approach to learning, where they are aiming to reproduce material in a test or exam rather than actually understand it25.
A critical assumption here is that approaches to learning are strongly determined by students’ perceptions of the educational context and not only determined by students’ backgrounds26. There is therefore no such thing as a ‘deep learner’ or a ‘surface learner’ – the same student can take different approaches depending on the educational context27.
What does this mean for engineering education?
If approaches to learning are determined by the student’s response to an educational context then the challenge for educators is to create environments which foster deep approaches to learning28. This is not as straightforward as one might guess, especially in engineering programmes which have high workloads and ‘high stakes’ assessment29.
Research with engineering students has also uncovered a more detailed range of approaches to learning, with ‘procedural approaches’ in between the classic deep and surface approaches30. Procedural approaches involve students focusing on solving problems, and this can be with either ‘surface’ or ‘deep’ intentions.This suggests that we need to think about the traditional advice given to engineering students to ‘do loads of problems and understanding will come later’. From marking examination scripts and design reports most teachers know what happens when students have focused on learning problem solving procedures at the expense of understanding what they are doing.
In what ways might this be a useful thinking tool?
Context is everything in approaches to learning theory.You can’t simply ‘blame the student’ – you have to try and understand how the educational environment is being perceived.This is not as difficult as it might sound. Many people like to use inventories to identify students’ approaches to learning (for example, Ellis et al., 2008) but it has also been argued that simple qualitative studies using student interviews can generate useful contextual results31.
Show me an example
Ellis, R. A., Goodyear, P., Calvo, R. A., and Prosser, M. (2008). Engineering students’ conceptions of and approaches to learning through discussions in face-to-face and online contexts. Learning and Instruction, 18 (3), 267-282.
Robert Ellis and colleagues conducted their investigation with third year engineering students at an Australian university.They focused their study on conceptions of learning (see tool 2) and approaches to learning, building on the assumption that conceptions of learning are likely to influence approaches to learning.They were interested to see how these ideas might apply in the context of an innovative course which used both face-toface and online discussions.
They conducted both a qualitative study using a phenomenographic approach (see tool 2) and a quantitative analysis using student learning inventories.They obtained similar results from both analyses, showing relatively strong correlations between ‘cohesive’ conceptions of learning and deep approaches to learning.They concluded that it is important for lecturers to help students develop approaches to learning in which discussions (both faceto-face and online) are seen as important sites for building understanding.
Where can I read further to learn more about this tool?
Biggs, J. B. (1999).What the student does: teaching for enhanced learning. Higher Education Research and Development, 18 (1), 55-75.
John Biggs is one of the key scholars in this area of research. His early results with his ‘Study Process Questionnaire’32 were surprisingly similar to those arising independently from the work by Marton, Entwistle and colleagues mentioned earlier. His writing is practical and highly accessible and a good starting point for anyone wanting to explore this area further.
In this paper, Biggs responds to concerns currently raised about how to meet the needs of the diverse range of students now entering higher education. In describing two hypothetical students, Susan and Robert, he provides a useful illustration of what deep and surface approaches mean in a particular course. He then puts forward his idea of ‘constructive alignment’ which involves creating educational environments where teaching and assessment are aligned with desired educational outcomes, such that more students will be likely to adopt deep approaches.
Biggs then backtracks a little to provide a very useful history on approaches to learning research. He uses these ideas together with the ideas of conceptual change (see tool 1) to formulate an approach to teaching which focuses on ‘what the student does’.This, he argues, is more effective than trying to cater to individual students’ varying requirements. To achieve constructive alignment one needs to ensure that learning objectives, teaching methods, and assessment are all focused towards the same thing. In discussing learning objectives he uses the SOLO taxonomy described under tool 1. He also provides a useful range of teaching methods for consideration, as well as assessment tools.This paper is really a helpful overview of a progressive and practical way to rethinking teaching in higher education.
Learning as participation
Learning is not merely a matter of acquiring knowledge, it is a matter of deciding what kind of person you are and want to be and engaging in those activities that make one a part of the relevant communities. (Brickhouse, 2001, p. 286)
In working with Tools 4-6 we will draw on a very different perspective on what it is to learn33. Here we focus on learning as participation.This is not any sort of activity: students are learning to do the activities associated with the professional community of engineers.
- This original research is described in the book The Experience of Learning, now in its second edition (Marton, Hounsell, and Entwistle, 1997).Although out of print this book is available free online at http://www.tla.ed.ac.uk/ resources/EoL.html. The field of phenomenography (described in Tool 2) developed from the original study which identified approaches to learning (Marton and Säljö, 1976).
- (Ramsden, 2003).
- This is a crucial difference between approaches to learning and learning styles (for an overview of learning styles in engineering education, see Felder and Silverman, 1988).
- Biggs calls this ‘constructive alignment’ (Biggs, 1999).
- See, for example, Case (2004).
- (Case and Marshall, 2004).
- (Case and Marshall, in press).
- (Biggs, 1978).
- This can be termed a sociocultural perspective on learning (Cobb and Bowers, 1999).
