John T.E. Richardson

Using Questionnaires to Evaluate Student Learning:
Some Health Warnings

John T.E.Richardson (Brunel University)

Reproduced with permission from Gibbs, G. (ed.) Improving Student Learning - Theory and Practice. Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff Development (1994)

Introduction

There is a general consensus in the research literature that students in higher education manifest a number of different approaches to learning that are dependent upon the context, the content, and the demands of the learning task (see, e.g., Marton, Hounsell, and Entwistle, 1984; Richardson, Eysenck, and Warren Piper, 1987). In particular, they may adopt a "deep" approach insofar as they acknowledge the more abstract forms of learning that are demanded in higher education and are motivated by the relevance of the syllabus to their own personal needs and interests; they adopt a "surface" approach insofar as they encounter an overloaded curriculum and methods of assessment which emphasise the superficial properties of the material that is to be learned; and they adopt a "strategic" approach to the extent that they receive cues about their assessment schemes from members of teaching staff. The defining characteristics of these three different approaches to learning are summarised in Table 1.

Table 1. Defining Features of Three Approaches to Learning

Most of the original research which gave rise to this categorisation of approaches to studying used a qualitative, interview-based methodology that has been variously described as "experiential", "introspective" and "phenomenographic". This has been claimed to be much more sensitive to the different meanings that individuals ascribe to learning in different academic situations, and yet the precise research procedures used in these studies are typically not specified in any detail. In particular, Fleming (1986) criticised this work for neglecting "the essentially social nature of the interview" (p. 560), and he argued that students' accounts of their approaches to learning had been reduced to the level of the stories told to tourists by their couriers. Fleming commented: "It may be tempting to consider the perspective of the culture which the tourist can develop through conducted tours to be limited, partial, biased or in other ways inadequate compared to the perspectives of the indigenous population in the routine, mundane activities of their everyday life" (p. 559).

In fact, the only piece of phenomenographic research that I have come across in which the researchers even begin to specify their methodology is a study by Morgan, Taylor and Gibbs (1982), who interviewed 29 British students on an introductory social science course at the Open University. Morgan et al. stated that transcripts of their interviews were analysed according to the methods of "grounded theory", and that this analysis revealed deep-level and surface-level approaches to studying that were broadly similar to those which had been described previously by Marton and Saljo (1976) in Sweden (see also Morgan, Gibbs, and Taylor, 1980).

Now, grounded theory is a methodology developed by Glaser and Strauss (1967) for the analysis of qualitative data, in which specific themes are derived from the respondents' accounts without regard to the researcher's own preconceptions. According to this general approach, "it makes no sense to start with 'received' theories or variables (categories) because these are likely to inhibit or impede the development of new theoretical formulations" (Strauss and Corbin, 1990, p. 50). However, Morgan et al. began their account by asserting that Marton and Saljo's (1976) contrast between deep-level and surface-level approaches to studying marked "a crucial aspect of understanding how students handle learning materials" (p. 107), and it is clear that a fundamental goal of their work was to identify the same distinction in the accounts given by Open University students. A sceptic might therefore argue that their analysis was rather more a case of reading things into the facts than a genuine instance of grounded theory.

Other researchers who follow in the phenomenographic tradition are quite prepared to use "chats at the foot of the stairs" with students as well as informal discussions "over a beer" with their teachers (Eizenberg, 1986, p. 21). As a result, the context of their research is often poorly structured, so that (intended or unintended) aspects of the researchers' behaviour may well prompt the participants to respond in a way that tends to confirm the researchers' own expectations. This process of behaviour confirmation in social interactions (commonly described as the idea of a "self-fulfilling prophecy") has been well documented (Snyder and Swann, 1978). Of course, I would not want to claim that research carried out by people who are properly trained and supervised in the use of qualitative methods is vulnerable to the same flaws (at any rate, not to this extent). However, since there are very few opportunities for research training in this area, and none (to my knowledge) that is professionally accredited, the validity of most of the phenomenographic research that is carried out must be open to question.

The availability of training is important not simply as a scientific issue, but also as an ethical one. The aim of qualitative research is to reveal personal meanings, and it follows that much of the material that is uncovered in an interview can be of considerable personal significance to the informant and emotionally very highly loaded. Occasionally, indeed, the encounter may slip from a research interview to a counselling session. This will obviously make considerable emotional demands on the researcher, and yet few people who embark upon qualitative research have the personal skills, professional training, and competent supervision to handle those demands. So, although the phenomenographic approach is often held up as a model to be followed by those who wish to understand student learning, and indeed has been proposed as a device for enhancing the professional skills of teachers themselves, I would personally counsel against the use of such an approach in the absence of appropriate training and supervision.

These ethical issues can be avoided (some might say, "evaded") by the use of standardised instruments that do not depend on any direct personal interaction between the researcher and the informants, such as checklists, inventories or questionnaires administered to individuals in large groups. This also tends to reduce the possibility of the informants being prompted by intended or unintended aspects of the researcher's behaviour. A number of attempts have been made to operationalise the distinctions among different approaches to learning in terms of the students' responses to different subscales of particular questionnaires. The rest of this paper will therefore be concerned with evidence obtained from the use of three of these instruments.

The Study Processes Questionnaire

This instrument was developed by Biggs (1978,1985) in Australia and Canada. It contains seven items on each of six scales that are intended to measure the respondents' motives and strategies on three approaches to learning ("surface", "deep" and "achieving"). Unfortunately, studies in Australia and other countries have failed to reproduce this constituent structure.

Instead, the scales appear to define merely two factors: one is a generalised deep approach to studying, measured by deep and achieving motives and strategies; the other is a generalised surface approach to studying, measured by surface and achieving motives and surface strategy (Biggs, 1987, p. 16; Biggs and Rihn, 1984; Watkins and Akande, 1992; Watkins and Regmi, 1990; cf. Hattie and Watkins, 1981; O'Neil and Child, 1984). There is also concern about the item composition of the scales intended to measure a surface approach to studying (see Christensen, Massey, and Isaacs, 1991; Kember and Gow, 1990, 1991; O'Neil and Child, 1984).

The Inventory of Learning Processes

This was developed in the United States by Schmeck, Ribich and Ramanaiah (1977) on the basis of contemporary theoretical developments in experimental research into human learning and memory. It contains a total of 62 true-false items intended to measure four different scales. These were explained by Schmeck and Grove (1979) in the following manner:

synthesis-analysis: assessing deep, as opposed to superficial, information processing;
study methods: assessing repetitive, drill-and-practice habits of processing information;
fact retention: assessing attention to details and specifics as opposed to generalities;
and
elaborative processing: assessing elaborative, as opposed to verbatim, information processing.

Recently, Schmeck, Geisler-Brenstein and Cercy (1991) supplemented these scales with seven other scales examining broader aspects of self-concept and personality to produce a Revised Inventory of Learning Processes in which the respondents indicate the extent of agreement or disagreement along a six-point scale with each of 160 statements.

While the Inventory of Learning Processes was originally validated using factor analysis and other techniques, subsequent studies both in the United States and elsewhere have failed to replicate its intended factor structure (Schmeck and Geisler-Brenstein, 1989; Speth and Brown, 1988; Watkins and Hattie, 1981). Moreover, the original scales were supposed to be independent of each other, but more recent studies have found them to be correlated, sometimes extremely so (Henson and Schmeck, 1993; Schmeck et al., 1991). Finally, the "levels-of-processing" framework which motivated this Inventory is no longer seen as providing an adequate rationale for understanding and investigating human memory (Baddeley, 1990, pp. 160-172; Eysenck and Keane, 1990, pp. 148-155). Hence, the instrument has no special advantages over other inventories for research purposes by virtue of its supposed theoretical underpinning.

The Approaches to Studying Inventory

Without doubt, the most widely used questionnaire on student learning in higher education is the Approaches to Studying Inventory (ASI) devised by Entwistle and his colleagues (Entwistle, Hanley, and Hounsell, 1979; Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983, pp. 35-55; Ramsden and Entwistle, 1981). The ASI incorporates a variety of constructs taken from interview-based work on student learning, and in its final version consists of 64 items in 16 subscales, grouped in turn under four general headings (see Table 2). The specific distinction between "deep", "surface" and "strategic" approaches is subsumed within a somewhat broader classification in terms of a "meaning orientation", a "reproducing orientation" and an "achieving orientation", and supplemented by a fourth domain representing various learning styles and pathologies described by Pask (1976).

Source: Ramsden and Entwistle (1981, p. 371).

Table 2. Subscales Contained in the Approaches to Studying Inventory

Unfortunately, research studies have consistently failed to reproduce the intended constituent structure of this instrument (for reviews, see Harper and Kember, 1989; Meyer and Parsons, 1989b). Most of these obtained clear evidence for two major factors:

(a) a "meaning orientation" factor indexed by the subscales concerned with deep approach, inter-relating ideas, the use of evidence and logic, intrinsic motivation and comprehension learning; and

(b) a "reproducing orientation" factor indexed by the subscales concerned with surface approach, syllabus-boundness, fear of failure, disorganised study methods, negative attitudes to studying, globe trotting and improvidence.

In addition, some studies (though by no means all) have produced evidence for two additional factors:

(c) a "narrow orientation" factor indexed by the subscales concerned with operation learning and strategic approach; and

(d) a "goal orientation" factor indexed by the subscales concerned with extrinsic motivation and achievement motivation.

Moreover, a few studies have reported factor analyses of the responses to the individual items, and these have often failed to reproduce many of the subscales (Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983, pp. 50-52; Entwistle and Waterston, 1988; Meyer and Parsons, 1989a, 1989b; Schmeck, 1988; Speth and Brown, 1988).

Given the somewhat doubtful status of certain of the subscales of the full ASI, it might be thought useful to develop an abbreviated inventory which focussed upon these two fundamental study orientations. Entwistle (1981, pp. 57-60,100103) devised a version for use with sixth-formers in which 30 items defined seven subscales which could be combined in various ways to yield eight indices of studying, including meaning orientation, reproducing orientation and achieving orientation (see also Entwistle and Ramsden, 1983, pp. 53-55). Gibbs, Habeshaw and Habeshaw (1988) proposed that this version could be shortened further to produce an inventory of just the 18 items concerned with the different orientations to studying. This was used to evaluate innovative forms of course design and delivery in the CNAA project on "Improving Student Learning" (Gibbs, 1992).

However, these shortened versions of the ASI are inadequate because their subscales lack sufficient internal consistency (see Watkins, 1984). There is also evidence that they measure fairly specific aspects of study behaviour rather than more global study orientations (Richardson, 1992; but cf. Newstead, 1992). I have argued instead (Richardson, 1990) that it would be more appropriate to abbreviate the original ASI by focussing upon the eight subscales which had been consistently identified with meaning orientation and with reproducing orientation across the different academic disciplines studied by Entwistle and Ramsden (1983, p. 52). This yields an inventory of 32 items with the following structure:

I was able to show that these eight subscales and the two principal study orientations could be successfully reproduced by means of factor analysis.

Cultural Specificity of Approaches to Studying

The three instruments that have just been discussed were originally developed in three different countries (Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom, respectively). Marton and his colleagues originally argued that the different approaches to studying were cultural phenomena which were socially constructed (see Dahlgren, 1984; Marton, 1981; Saljo, 1984,1987), and this suggests that they may well be culture-relative and culture-specific (Marton, 1976). Be that as it may, these questionnaires tend to be employed by researchers and practitioners in various countries in a relatively indiscriminate manner. Is this in fact warranted?

Most of the relevant evidence has come from the use of the ASI. In factor analyses of the subscale scores, similar solutions have been found in studies carried out in the United Kingdom, Australia, South Africa, the United States, Nepal, Venezuela and Hong Kong. This indicates that the ASI is fairly "portable" from one system of higher education to another. However, factor analyses of the responses to individual items have failed to confirm the integrity of some of the subscales in the United Kingdom, in South Africa, and especially in the United States. I have carried out a study using the 32-item version of the ASI at a university in the United States, and have come to the conclusion that the basic study orientations are interpreted in a manner that is distinctive to each cultural context. Similar research at the University of the South Pacific using the 18-item version of the ASI has led to broadly the same conclusion. It is unclear at present whether this conclusion applies equally to cultural or ethnic groups within the same country.

Variations with Educational Level

These questionnaires have also been employed with students at different educational levels. Most specifically, the Study Processes Questionnaire and the ASI have both been adapted for use with secondary schoolchildren. Whether it is legitimate to employ the same constructs in such diverse educational settings has not, however, been rigorously tested. There is some evidence from South Africa that black students from disadvantaged educational backgrounds are more likely to show a fragmented pattern of study orientations (Meyer, Dunne, and Sass, 1992). Another study carried out in the United States using the Inventory of Learning Processes came to essentially the same conclusion in the case of students who entered higher education through community colleges rather than directly to universities (Henson and Schmeck, 1993). At Brunel University we have been exploring the approaches to studying of mature students taking "Access" courses and have similarly failed to find any coherent factor solution from their responses to the ASI. Nevertheless, other mature students who enter then University directly (with or without conventional entrance qualifications) manifest the same general pattern as younger students coming straight from school. This suggests that something odd may happen to students' study approaches as the result of following an "Access" course into higher education.

Individual Differences in Approaches to Studying

Previous research has tended to focus upon the aggregated responses given by groups of students in reporting how they engage with academic learning, rather than the responses of individual students who make up those groups. Meyer and his colleagues (Meyer and Muller, l990a, l990b; Meyer, Parsons, and Dunne, 1990) have advocated the use of different methodologies to compare the patterns of responses that are given by individual students. However, their analyses are based upon the subscale scores generated by particular students, and hence have taken for granted the integrity of the subscales themselves (cf. also Meyer and Parsons, 1989b).

Most research into student learning has failed to investigate whether there are systematic qualitative differences between individual students. In fact, typically no information is provided about the students' personal characteristics at all. This is true even of the earlier phenomenographic studies, in spite of their avowed concern to give a proper account of the personal meanings ascribed to learning by individual students. Such basic information as the gender and age of the participants in these studies was left wholly unspecified. Subsequently, however, Entwistle (1981, p. 75) reported that all of the participants in Marton's original experiment were women. So, are there systematic qualitative differences between older and younger students or between men and women in their approaches to studying?

The variable of age is of some interest because British institutions of higher education are currently having to recruit from the older sectors of the population, and yet it seems to be widely held that mature students lack the basic skills needed for effective study in higher education. The totality of research evidence does not support this stereotype, however: mature students are more likely than younger students to adopt a meaning orientation to their studying and are less likely to adopt a reproducing orientation (Richardson, in press). Their academic attainment is also at least as good as that of younger students (Richardson, in preparation). Perhaps most crucially, there is no sign of any difference at all between the factor solutions generated by older and younger students from their responses to the 32-item ASI (Richardson, in preparation).

The effects of gender are more complicated. In the United States there has developed a very influential tradition based upon the use of qualitative methods which maintains that women demonstrate conceptions of knowledge, truth and learning in their intellectual development that are qualitatively different from those of male students (see Belenky, Clinchy, Goldberger, and Tarule, 1986; Clinchy and Zimmerman, 1982; Gilligan, 1982; Gilligan, Ward, McLean Taylor, and Bardige, 1988). Nevertheless, research using formal inventories or questionnaires to quantify students' use of different approaches or orientations has failed to produce any consistent evidence for differences between men and women in their responses (see Richardson and King, 1991). This seems to apply even to the constituent structure of their responses across different items (Richardson, 1993).

This might be taken to support the view expressed by Perry (1981) and others that quantitative methods cannot provide an adequate account of the cognitive structures and social meanings of students in higher education. However, it might be that gender differences in approaches to studying do influence students' responses to questionnaires in specific contexts. In my own investigation of university students in the United States and in a previous study by Miller, Finley and McKinley (1990), male students were found to produce higher scores on meaning orientation and lower scores on reproducing orientation than female students. I attributed this to the widespread use in North America of multiple-choice tests, which are known to favour male students over female ones (Murphy, 1982).

Recent interview-based research by Thomas (1988,1990) in the United Kingdom suggests that differences between male and female students will vary across different academic subjects, and will be especially apparent in science courses, since these tend to challenge the personal identity and confidence of female students. In support of this idea, Meyer, Dunne and I have found qualitative differences between men and women taking a first-year service course in statistics at one South African university. However, consistent with the views of Marton and his colleagues, I and my colleagues at Brunel University have also found evidence for a three-way interrelationship between gender, subject, and learning context in a study of men and women at three Oxbridge colleges. In particular, women taking science courses obtained higher scores on meaning orientation if they were in a more male environment (a college that was formerly exclusively male), whereas women taking arts courses obtained higher scores if they were in a more female environment (a college that was exclusively female).

Conclusions

For both ethical and practical reasons, I would suggest that both researchers and practitioners should use quantitative devices such as inventories and questionnaires if they wish to monitor and evaluate the approaches to studying of their students. My first "health warning" is that qualitative research methods should only be employed by people who have the proper skills, training and supervision.

Three different inventories have been employed in previous research on student learning, but none of these devices measures what it claims in the sense that its constituent structure can be empirically confirmed on participants similar to those on whom it was originally developed. So my second "health warning" is that these questionnaires should be used only with great care, if at all. The same observation applies to the 30-item and 18-item versions of the ASI. I would personally commend the 32-item version of the ASI as the only instrument for monitoring student learning whose constituent structure has been successfully replicated.

These questionnaires serve to operationalise constructs whose value in describing individual differences in student learning has been clearly documented. Nevertheless, the generalisability of these constructs from their original domain of application should not be taken for granted. My third "health warning" is that problems of interpretation may well arise in seeking to use these instruments with students from different cultures or from different educational levels.

Finally, I have criticised previous research into student learning, including that motivated by the phenomenographic tradition, for paying insufficient attention-to differences between individual students based upon obvious demographic characteristics such as age and gender. I have argued elsewhere that an insensitivity to such variables merely helps to maintain the manifest inequalities that already exist in higher education (Richardson, in press; Richardson and King, 1991). Thus, my fourth "health warning" is to urge researchers and practitioners alike to be attentive to the needs, aspirations and achievements of all of the students with whom their investigations are concerned.

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