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Research aimed at understanding how students experience their learning environment and how that experience relates to the quality of their learning needs to be conducted using a wider range of variables and more sophisticated analytical methods. In this study of one context, some of the relations found in earlier bivariate studies, and on which learning intervention strategies have been built, are not confirmed when more holistic teaching-learning contexts are analysed using multi-variable methods.

This paper describes a study designed to test whether situated conceptions of learning can be measured using questionnaires, and the relations between these aspects of students' awareness, their awareness of other environmental variables, and their learning outcomes. A situated conception of learning is one that is evoked and adopted by students in response to their perceptions of their learning tasks in a particular context. It may reflect the aims they have for their studies, once they have started that study and experienced that study environment. The results from this small-scale, limited-context study showed that when students perceived the learning environment as being more supportive of learning, they were more likely to describe a situated conception of learning that was more closely aligned with those promoted by the University. They also had higher scores on the deep approach to learning scale, lower scores on the surface approach scale, and expected to leave university with a higher degree classification. These associations, which suggest that situated conceptions, like prior experience of learning, may be a crucial indicator of learning approach and outcomes of learning, are sufficiently large to warrant more rigorous investigations.

This article reports on a review of empirical research published in selected higher education journals in 2008, which was focused on examining how often theories are developed through research. This review found relatively little evidence of theory development. Drawing on the notions of internal and external languages of description, it is argued that this is partly due to the lack of explicit conceptualisation of the object of research in the writing-up of higher education research, and the lack of a discursive gap between the ways in which research objects are conceptualised and the ways in which data are analysed in accounts of empirical research into higher education. In conclusion, four ways of promoting such a discursive gap in the reporting of research are discussed. IntroductionTo the reader of empirical research into higher education, the issue of how theory is used and developed in this research can seem a particularly thorny one. Much of it appears to have little explicit engagement with theoretical resources (Tight 2004) and, where theory is used, it rarely seems to be developed through the research process in a sustained manner over time. Rather the impression given is of a succession of theoretical lenses, the relations between which are not clear, and the reasons for the changes in lens very seldom discussed (see Bernstein 2000 for a discussion of a similar process in sociological research). Thus, for example, in research into teaching, learning and assessment in higher education, there have been recent shifts between 'approaches to learning', 'academic literacies' and 'communities of practice' (Haggis 2009), but little discussion of the different strengths and weaknesses of each of these lenses for asking particular types of question (see Ashwin 2009 for my own attempt to develop such a discussion). This can leave the reader with the sense that such changes are more a matter of fashion than of ongoing critical discussion of the most useful ways of conceiving of teaching-learning processes in particular situations. In this article I report on a review of empirical research published in selected higher education journals in 2008, which examined whether this impression had some substance and, if so, the reasons for this lack of theory development.