Learning and Studying: Contrasts and Influences: Noel Entwistle

CREATING THE FUTURE
Perspectives on Educational Change

Compiled and Edited by Dee Dickinson

LEARNING AND STUDYING: CONTRASTS AND INFLUENCES
Noel Entwistle, Ph.D.

What we learn depends on how we learn, and why we have to learn it. Recent research on the ways in which students in higher education tackle their day-to-day academic work has drawn attention to the need to think of learning as the outcome of a whole range of interacting factors. Of course, how well we learn depends on our intelligence-or rather the level of our various intelligences in relation to the task we have to do. It has been clear for many years that achievement in formal educational contexts also depends on effort, and on the general level of student motivation. But increasingly, research on student learning has been describing additional influences on academic learning. These influences depend, in part, on the individual characteristics of learners, and on their past experiences in education. They also depend on current experience within the courses they are taking-the quality of the teaching, and above all on the nature of the assessment procedures. We now have a set of related concepts which allow us to understand why some students do well, while others do badly.

The starting point has to be the reasons for which a student is taking a particular course. Some students enter higher education mainly for the intellectual challenge, or to prove they are capable of degree level work. They have an academic orientation. Others are more concerned with obtaining a qualification which will ensure a safe job. This is a vocational orientation. These different purposes inevitably affect not just the degree of effort they will put into the course, but also the kind of effort, as we shall see.
Students also come into higher education with different beliefs about what learning itself actually means. When adults from a range of ages and educational backgrounds are asked to explain what they understood by "learning," a series of contrasting conceptions is found which can be seen as a hierarchy, increasing in both sophistication and complexity. Adults hold very different conceptions of learning. It has been found that many people who have left school early see learning as just the result of building up separate bits of knowledge, like bricks in a wall. This view seems to be reinforced by traditional forms of education which test mainly the acquisition of facts, and also by quiz shows which reward the same kind of knowledge! Closely allied to this simplest conception is the idea that learning depends on memorizing what has to be learned. But to be useful, information eventually has to be applied in some way; this leads to a rather more sophisticated conception.
All these first three conceptions imply that information is presented to the learner whose job it is, when required, to reproduce that information in the same form as it was originally learned. This is not unreasonable when facts are being learned, but that is only one type of learning. Often we have to understand something for ourselves and that depends on a transformation of the knowledge presented, an ability to relate it to what is already known and to make personal sense of it. The more sophisticated conceptions stress the extent to which the learner has to be active in making sense of the material and, in the process, may change as a person.

Different Conceptions of Learning (Adapted from Saljo, 1979, and Beaty, Dall'Alba & Marton, 1990)

A. Increasing one's knowledge

B. Memorizing and reproducing -- Reproducing
C. Utilizing facts and procedures
D. Developing an initial understanding -- Transforming

E. Transforming one's understanding
F. Changing as a person

When students are asked to carry out an academic task, like preparing for a tutorial or writing an essay, the way in which they tackle that task depends on why they are taking the course and on what they believe learning requires of them. This means that when they think about how to tackle the task, different students actually have rather different intentions. And those intentions have proved to be closely related to how they go about learning, and the quality of the learning they achieve.
Research on this topic was carried out initially by Ference Marton and his colleagues in Gothenburg. From interviews with students who had been asked to read an academic article and to be "ready to answer questions on it afterwards", they distinguished between deep and surface "approaches to learning" which depended on the students' intention when tackling the task. Some students intended simply to spot facts likely to form questions, and then to memorize them; in other words they focused on the surface level of the text. Other students intended to understand what the author was saying, and so focused more deeply on the underlying meaning, and sought to integrate the components. The characteristics of these contrasting approaches are summarized below.

Defining features of approaches to learning (Adapted from Marton et al., 1984, and Entwistle & Ransden, 1983)

Deep Approaches

Intention to understand material for oneself
Interacting vigorously and critically on content

Relating ideas to previous knowledge/experience
Using organizing principles to integrate ideas

Relating evidence to conclusions
Examining the logic of the argument

Surface Approach

Intention simply to reproduce parts of the content
Accepting ideas and information passively
Concentrating only on assessment requirements
Not reflecting on purpose or strategies in learning
Memorizing facts and procedures routinely
Failing to recognize guiding principles or patterns

The research of Fransson, Biggs and Entwistle, using interviews and questionnaires to indicate the relative strengths of deep and surface approaches, showed that each approach was associated with distinctive forms of motivation. A surface approach was associated with anxiety and fear of failure, and to some extent with vocational motives, while a deep approach was consistently linked with academic interest in the subject for its own sake, and with self-confidence. Although these forms of motivation are characteristics of the learner, interest and self-confidence, or boredom and anxiety, are also the products of experiences within higher education.
One result of these findings has been to suggest new ways of teaching study skills. Making students more aware of their own study methods and learning styles allows them to control their activities more consciously. Traditional approaches to study skills training have focused on specific skills, like note-taking or essay-writing, and yet students often seem not to transfer such training into everyday studying. More recent work has been designed to help students to see the purposes of the work they have to do, to consider strategies, and to monitor their success -- in other words to become more meta-cognitively aware of the processes of studying. There is accumulating evidence that this method is effective in improving feelings of confidence and in increasing the levels of achievement, at least for students with the necessary initial motivation. Where motivation is initially low, however, it may be necessary to use more direct methods of training study skills. Researchers have improved students' attainments by helping the students see that they can change their study methods in ways which will improve their academic performance and also by direct training in the thinking skills which underlie academic tasks.
Changing study habits, however, is not sufficient. It is also necessary to see how the teaching and assessment in a course affect how students learn. The importance of the deep approach to learning can be seen in other research which shows how it affects the level of understanding reached. In a recent study of first-year students taking a physics course, Prosser and Millar (1989) showed that only students who had used a deep approach to their learning changed their conception of technical material in the ways required by the lecturers. Students relying on surface approaches were left with inadequate conceptions that would create increasing problems for them as they progressed through the course.
Thus, we have to consider what forms of teaching and assessment evoke interest and, through that, a deep approach to learning and deeper levels of conceptual understanding. We also have to avoid establishing learning environments which inhibit the types of learning that are required. Our recent studies have shown that a deep approach is more common in departments whose students rate them as having good teaching and allowing freedom in learning. The students describe good teaching within lectures in terms of level, pace, structure, explanations, enthusiasm and empathy. Freedom in learning at its simplest level may mean no more than a reasonable choice of essay topics, but it extends into more innovative teaching methods which encourage greater independence and self-reliance. In contrast, departments which students rated as having a heavy workload, or as having assessment procedures emphasizing the accurate reproduction of detailed information, are each likely to induce a surface approach to learning and studying.
There is accumulating evidence that overloaded syllabuses, particularly in the applied sciences, lead to student coping strategies that inhibit high quality learning. The effects of current assessment procedures are also worrying. Short-answer or multiple-choice tests, which are increasingly being used in higher education, seem to encourage surface approaches to learning, whereas essay-type examinations usually demand deep approaches. However, even essay questions may make very different demands on students, and so evoke contrasting responses. It may seem inevitable that questions which ask for an "explanation" will test conceptual understanding. To some extent this is true, but one of our recent studies has suggested different forms of "understanding." Students can "understand" their lecture notes, where they are based on a well-structured lecture course, without much active engagement with the ideas. They can accept the information within the lecturer's own structure and repeat it in only a slightly modified form in the examination. The explanation will generally be accepted as "sound", even if evidence of wider reading is lacking, as the structure of the answer will reflect the understanding of the lecturer. But such a reproductive argument will not represent evidence of the student's own conceptual understanding. Thus it cannot indicate whether the student will be able to apply those ideas to novel situations.
Besides teaching and assessment as separate influences, it is also clear that the approach to learning is affected by the curriculum as a whole. Putting together the accumulating evidence on the effects of learning environments on the quality of student learning, it is possible to alter courses, including the teaching and assessment procedures, in ways which more directly support a deep approach to learning.

About: Noel Entwistle

Noel Entwistle is Bell Professor of Education and Director of the Centre for Research on Learning and Instruction at the University of Edinburgh.
Since 1968 his main research interested has been on student learning in higher education. He has directed a series of major studies which have contributed greatly to the understanding of how teaching and assessment affect the quality of learning.
The following description of his work seems clearly related to the previous articles on different kinds of intelligence and the characteristics of the "flow state" as he describes "deep learning" and the transformation of information into knowledge.
Professor Entwistle has been editor of the British Journal of Education Psychology, and currently serves on the Editorial Boards of the journals Medical Education and the European Journal of the Psychology of Education.
He is a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and has an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Gothenburg. He has published extensively in academic journals related to educational psychology and higher education.
His books include Styles of Learning and Teaching (1981), Understanding Student Learning (1983), Understanding Classroom Learning (1987), and The Experience of Learning (1989, coeditor). He was general editor of The Handbook of Educational Ideas and Practices (1990).

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