Deep/Surface Approaches To Learning: An Introduction

James Rhem, Executive Editor

In the last twenty years, this line of inquiry (in which the idea of "styles" emerges as secondary to a larger preoccupation with "approaches" to learning) has been pursued by many researchers working in a variety of countries. The research has looked at thousands of students studying in over 40 disciplines. Repeatedly, it has found fundamental patterns in studying and learning behavior as it actually occurs within the contexts of university education.

Probably the most influential finding of the original experiments, the researchers say, was what they describe as an "obvious aspect of learning virtually ignored by earlier research." And that was the fact that many students did not get the point of what they were reading "simply because they were not looking for it."

What were they looking for? They were looking for the facts they thought they would be tested on. They were not looking for the meaning of the text. In a sense, for them, at least as they perceived the situation, the meaning of the text stood in direction relation to the way they expected to be assessed. They were taking what has become known as a "surface approach" rather than a "deep approach" to learning.

Alarmingly, studies in Australia suggest that students progressively drop a deep approach to learning as they move through high school and college. It appears that in many ways, traditional teaching pushes students toward superficial levels of engagement with material, even as it hopes to do the opposite. Why? To find out these researcher put students and a qualitative look at what they thought they were doing in studying at the center of their work. They avoided questions such as "Do introverts learn mathematics more easily than extraverts?" or "Why are some teachers more effective than others?" Instead of asking "how" and "why" questions, they've concentrated on "what" questions: "What does it take to be good at learning from a text; to learn arithmetic; or to be an effective teacher?"

The shift toward a fuller understanding of learning phenomena in context involves an inquiry into the meaning of the underlying human actions involved. Instead of projecting laboratory ideas about learning onto real-world settings, and rather than assume that "output" or achievement equalled intelligence, they've approached students, observed their actions and listened very carefully as they described how they actually went about studying in particular situations. In the end, they have focused on meta-cognition as the heart of learning and view it as a phenomenon more influenced by the demands of particular learning environments than by predispositions of personality.

The research does not boil down into an easy or mechanistic answer to the challenges of good college teaching precisely because it shows very clearly how learning and teaching must be considered in relation both to the content and the context of the teaching. But repeatedly, Ference Marton (Sweden), Noel Entwistle (Scotland), Paul Ramsden (Australia) and a host of colleagues have found the same patterns emerging, patterns which have strong implications for making teaching in college effective.

For example, the same student may take a deep approach in a humanities class, where it seems to be demanded, and a surface approach in a science class where just grabbing the facts and formulae seem to equal academic success. Indeed, the very way in which these researchers, in dialogue with one another, moved toward the term "approach" and away the term "process" indicates how inseparable an awareness of context is to their insights into how students learn. "Approach," they feel, embraces a sense of the student's intention in taking up a learning task as well as how he goes about the task (processing it).

Intention emerges as perhaps the dominant idea in the pair (if one must dominate), because the hows of learning necessarily vary. And this is where the deep/surface approach literature takes up the idea of learning styles, not in terms of fixed traits or unyielding attributes of individual students, but in terms of cognitive (and social) orientations within deep or surface approaches to learning. It's true that the hows do vary in response to personal preference, habit, and personality as we are accustomed to thinking in the United States. But they vary more in response to a student's perception of particular contexts and the intention she forms as a result. Students build toward understanding in one of two general ways. Some draw a quick mental sketch of the material to be grasped, using analogies, metaphors, and ties to personal experience, and then fill in and alter that framework as they acquire more and more detailed information. Others build up a framework piece by piece only as they acquire knowledge of the details. The first approach roughly describes what the rearchers call comprehension learning; the second describes operations learning. Both are necessary — on both global and local levels — to develop real understanding.

Social orientations also affect student learning. Research at the Oxford Polytechnic and the Open University found four general social orientations: academic, vocational, personal, and social. Each of these also differed in response to the amount of extrinsic or intrinsic motivation students felt.

When faculty see vocabulary multiplying this way, they often feel an inner resistance, as though they were being asked to become part of a new religion. I know because I feel that way myself. But having pushed through and read a great deal of this research now, I've come away with a sense that some fundamental dynamics of the learning-teaching dance are being laid bare. The simple dualism — "deep/surface" — which sounds superficial, even judgmental at first, ends up representing a highly complex and empathic view of real-world learning. As these researches have kept on listening systematically and closely to what students have to say, their work is transforming what might be described as folklore and prejudice about how student are and how they learn into principles of understanding. And as understanding grows, so, often, does vocabulary.

For me this vocabulary has not been without humor and the insights humor brings. For example, one early researcher talks of "holist" and "atomist" approaches rather than "deep" and "surface." Confronting the problems of students' indulging in either extreme, he begins to speak of "globetrotting holists" and "improvident serialists." The temptation to type and stereotype is so strong, it crops up even in resolutely systemic and contextual thinkers. But the point is clear: Facts are dust unless they lead to understanding; but theories are fantasy unless they remain awake to the facts. The implications for faculty are also clear: teach toward understanding, not grades. How to translate that trusim into action is the subject of the accompanying sidebar.