This article focuses on the surprising lack of critique in the pedagogical literatures of higher education in relation to the use of ideas surrounding deep and surface approaches to learning. The article explores problems with the assumed relationships between ‘conceptions of learning’, ‘perceptions of the learning environment’, ‘approaches to learning’ and ‘learning outcomes’, and suggests that whilst the model may be successful in creating a generalised description of the ‘elite’ goals and values of academic culture, it says surprisingly little about the majority of students in a mass system. After exploring research in the area of academic literacies as an alternative approach to understanding student learning, it is suggested that higher education is going to have to find new ways of conceptualising its core values and activities if it is to become truly accessible to the widest possible range of ‘lifelong learners’.

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This article is a response to a request to consider the following three questions in relation to the recent history of research into student learning in higher education: What do we know?, What do we need to know?, and What might we do about it? A survey of article titles reporting on research into student learning was carried out in three key higher education journals, and the results of this were then considered in the context of other, related research perspectives. The article will first report on the results of this review, and then discuss these results in the context of theoretical moves in psychology and sociology over the same period of time. The trends identified in the higher education journals will then be compared to research into student learning in higher education which is published in two other disciplinary areas: adult education and sociolinguistics. After raising some questions that arise from these comparisons, the final section of the article will outline some suggestions about ways in which higher education researchers might begin to 'think differently' about learning and research in this field.Universities today are homes of research into almost every subject save onethemselves. There are few fields of social science in which painstaking investigation is more necessary and less often pursued. (Lord James of Rusholme [1965], quoted in Maton, 2004) In the context of higher education, 'student learning research' is frequently taken to refer to the approaches to learning research, originated by Marton andSäljö (1984/ 1997) in the 1970s, and developed around the idea of 'deep' and 'surface' approaches to learning. Although an increasingly varied range of models and theoretical approaches to understanding student learning are becoming more prevalent in the literature, discussion about research into student learning in higher education is still frequently either based on these ideas, or takes them for granted (e.g. Gorsky, Caspi, and Trumper 2006;Rollnick et al. 2008). Despite its influence and success, however, the bulk of this research, although taking a first step in this direction, has arguably avoided many of the really difficult questions about the nature of 'universities themselves'. Focusing largely upon the cognitive processes of individual students, one of the main concerns of this research has been to find out what is wrong with students who do not engage in the ways that their tutors wish them to (Haggis 2003). In response to the repeated finding that large numbers of students appear not to be taking a deep approach, the question implied by the research seems to be 'why do so many

It is now widely accepted that qualitative and quantitative research traditions, rather than being seen as opposed to or in competition with each other ( Hammersley & Atkinson, 1995 ; Furlong, 2004) should be used, where appropriate, in some kind of combination (Bryman & Cramer, 1999; Moore et al., 2003). How this combining is to be understood ontologically, and therefore epistemologically, however, is not always clear. Rather than endlessly discussing the relationship between different approaches, this paper explores some of the assumptions of the ontologies that underpin such apparent differences, arguing that approaches which declare themselves to be distinct theoretically are often surprisingly similar methodologically. It is argued that dominant ontologies and epistemologies struggle with the conceptualisation and representation of particularity, difference, process, interactions through time, multiple and de‐centred forms of causation, and dynamic structure. Complexity/dynamic systems theory is then introduced and examined for its potential to offer the basis of a different kind of ontology: one which is able not only to accommodate these things, but which is itself based upon them. In conclusion, the implications of this perspective are discussed in relation to the problems that have been identified, particularly in relation to the conceptualisation of ‘context’.

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