Conceptions, Styles, and Approaches Within Higher Education: Analytic Abstractions and Everyday Experience

Abstract

In research on learning and thinking styles, one of the continuing debates concerns the appropriate level of description. This chapter introduces a set of concepts that have been developed to describe how students learn and study at university and to explain the influences on the quality of learning outcomes. The conceptual framework is derived from ideas introduced by Marton and his colleagues in Gothenburg. The concepts were established through interview studies, with the relations between them being explored through both qualitative analyses of interview transcripts and multivariate analyses of inventory scores. Out of this work came a series of concepts, with differing breadths of focus, but these analytic abstractions are all inevitably distanced from the phenomena they describe. The chapter suggests ways alternative forms of analysis may retain more of the everyday idiosyncrasy of behavior and thinking, while demonstrating the value of the conceptual framework through which students and staff can reflect critically about their current practices.