What have we been thinking of? A critical overview of 40 years of student learning research in higher education

Abstract

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

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