Approaches to Study
“Deep” and “Surface”

Deep and Surface are two approaches to study, derived from original empirical research by Marton and Säljö (1976) and since elaborated by Ramsden (1992), Biggs (1987, 1993) and Entwistle (1981), among others.

It is important to clarify what they are not.

Although learners may be classified as “deep” or “surface”, they are not attributes of individuals: one person may use both approaches at different times, although she or he may have a preference for one or the other.

They correlate fairly closely with motivation: “deep” with intrinsic motivation and “surface” with extrinsic, but they are not necessarily the same thing. Either approach can be adopted by a person with either motivation.

There is a third form, known as the “Achieving” or strategic approach, which can be summarised as a very well-organised form of Surface approach, and in which the motivation is to get good marks. The exercise of learning is construed as a game, so that acquisition of technique improves performance. It works as well as the analogy: insofar as learning is not a game, it breaks down.

Time to 'fess up: I was that strategic learner. Before I ever knew of this material, I used the terminology of the "academic game" in talking to fellow students, and even my own students, later on. (Oh! the shame of it!) But in reality it did not apply to all my course, just the bits I wasn't really interested in.

If you really want the manifesto of a strategic learner, click here

The features of Deep and Surface approaches can be summarised thus:

Deep	Surface
Focus is on “what is signified”	Focus is on the “signs” (or on the learning as a signifier of something else)
Relates previous knowledge to new knowledge	Focus on unrelated parts of the task
Relates knowledge from different courses	Information for assessment is simply memorised
Relates theoretical ideas to everyday experience	Facts and concepts are associated unreflectively
Relates and distinguishes evidence and argument	Principles are not distinguished from examples
Organises and structures content into coherent whole	Task is treated as an external imposition
Emphasis is internal, from within the student	Emphasis is external, from demands of assessment

(based on Ramsden, 1988)

The Surface learner is trying to “suss out” what the teacher wants and to provide it, and is likely to be motivated primarily by fear of failure. One interesting study has suggested that efforts by teachers to convey that what they want is Deep learning only succeeds in getting Surface learners to engage in ever more complex contextualising exercises, trying to reproduce the features of the Deep approach, from a Surface basis. (Ramsden, Beswick and Bowden, 1986)

Surface learning tends to be experienced as an uphill struggle, characterised by fighting against boredom and depressive feelings. Deep learning is experienced as exciting and a gratifying challenge.

There is some evidence that assessment methods can “reach back” into courses in such a way as to make Surface approaches more likely: it has not so far been demonstrated that appropriate assessment methods can of themselves encourage Deep learning.

The Deep and Surface distinction is a very popular one, much researched, using two main instruments; the Study Process Questionnaire (Biggs, 1987) and Entwistle's Approaches to Study Inventory. Although the original ideas were derived from the “phenomenographic” approach of open-ended measures factor-analysed to yield the basic Deep and Surface dimensions, later work has concentrated on refining scales to produce the dimensions (thus explicating the “symptoms” of each approach), and thereby regarded the approaches themselves as given.

One characteristic of the Surface approach is its tendency to “miss the point” of the learning. My reading of the evidence is that this may be a generalisation which is not completely supported by the evidence, particularly bearing in mind the non-subject-specific questionnaire instruments used which may not be able to get at this feature very easily.

What does not appear to have been researched is the problem of the structure of the knowledge being taught. While it is clear that either approach can be applied to practically anything, some subjects call forth a Surface approach more readily than others — law and medicine are perhaps examples*. While there is a correlation between Deep approaches and better results in summative assessments, nothing seems to have been done on outcomes in professional practice beyond the institution.

Two other points:

Many current university students have been "coached" by their teachers to get the grades they need for admission: they have been trained to be surface learners, and their experience is that it "works". Why should they take the risk of working in a different way?
Surface learning seems to be more likely when learning is isolated from practice. Practice has its own problems, in terms of "survival" practice, but surface learning is perhaps a function of the isolation of academic life from the real world where knowledge and ignorance have real consequences, rather than merely affecting assessment grades.

When I did a presentation on this to a group of doctors, they couldn't see what the problem was: Surface learning was clearly the only way to get through the medical school curriculum—you made the connections and learned the point of it all later. This accords exactly with Snyder's early work on the topic.

Conceptions of Learning

“Learning” means different things to different people. Säljö (1979) classified the conceptions held by respondents in his interview-based study into five categories:

Learning as a quantitative increase in knowledge. Learning is acquiring information or “knowing a lot”
Learning as memorising. Learning is storing information that can be reproduced.
Learning as acquiring facts, skills and methods that can be retained and used as necessary.
Learning as making sense or abstracting meaning. Learning involves relating parts of the subject matter to each other and to the real world.
Learning as interpreting and understanding reality in a different way. Learning involves comprehending the world by re-interpreting knowledge.

Approaches to Study “Deep” and “Surface”

Conceptions of Learning

Approaches to Study
“Deep” and “Surface”