Three exploratory studies are reported which extend the work on approaches to learning carried out by Marton and his colleagues in Gothenburg. The main aim of the studies was to develop a questionnaire to investigate the way students approach the task of reading an academic article. Marton had distinguished between 'deep' and 'surface' approaches, and a coding procedure has been developed to obtain similar categories from questionnaires. These exploratory studies, while not producing statistically convincing results, did confirm the pattern of findings reported by Marton and suggest ways in which his explanatory constructs could be elaborated to take account of the styles of learning adopted by students.Research into the relationships between study methods and academic performance has been carried out at Lancaster since 1968. The first major study was essentially concerned with prediction and was a conventional input-output research design with student characteristics in the first and final years being examined in relation to class of degree. The final report of this study has recently been published as part of Degrees of Excellence: the Academic Achievement Game (Entwistle & Wilson, 1977). Although the correlation analyses showed that only a small proportion of the variance in degree class was predictable in terms of measures of aptitude, study methods and personality, cluster analyses produced more encouraging results. The assumptions of correlational analyses demand uniform sets of relationships and produce a picture of the successful student as intelligent, hard-working, organised, single-minded and introverted. However, such a description is a contradiction of everyday experience. Although such students are found, and they may be the lecturers' 'ideal type', there are many other successful students who could not be classified in this way.
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