Meaning Orientation and Reproducing Orientation: a typology of approaches to studying in higher education?

Abstract

Interview‐based research has suggested that individual students exhibit either a deep approach or a surface approach to learning in higher education. Questionnaire‐based research has subsumed this notion within a distinction between a meaning orientation and a reproducing orientation to studying, but these are typically conceptualised as separate dimensions along which groups of students might vary. This study demonstrates that responses to questionnaires on studying can be analysed in such a way as to recover the distinction between a meaning orientation and a reproducing orientation in the form of a coherent, robust and reliable classification of the approaches to learning that are exhibited by individual students.