We've been asked to comment on Richardson's paper on different learning and teaching styles by students and tutors [RIchardson (2005), Students’ Approaches to Learning and Teachers’ Approaches to Teaching in Higher Education, Educational Psychology, 25, 673–680].
Säljö, Richardson reports, has five ways of thinking about learning, and they are: (i) learning to increase knowledge; (ii) learning as rote memory; (iii) to remember facts and figures, or (iv) to learn how to abstract meaning or even (v) to be self-reflective as a way to get at an understanding of reality.
These concepts and theories do fit my own experiences as a learner. I've definitely done each of these strategies, and I don't mean just as I was growing up, but as in even on this course I'm aware of using all of them. I understand that my goal is probably along points iv & v but in reality one often needs to have parts (i-iii) in order to learn.
Richardson also cites the notion of 'deep' vs. 'shallow' and then 'strategic' learners. Whilst I get the first two distinctions, I'm not sure what the third one really is. I understand that it's whatever takes to pass the course, but does that mean that a person who is a 'deep' learner would not adopt a 'shallow' strategy if (i) time was short and (ii) the topic seemed to have no intrinsic value or interest and (iii) the rewards for shallow learning are several magnitudes of order higher than deep learning? If this is not an unreasonable assumption, then doesn't such a person become a 'strategic' learner? It seems to me that Richardson is trying to suggest not the extremes of learning contexts in which a learner is forced to be 'strategic', but rather when all else is equal, then distinctions may occur (deep, shallow, strategic).
Unless I'm missing something, this paper illustrates the notion that these models are formulated to explain the different teaching and learning styles; bUT I don't see why we need to make these differentiations because they seem to be really a symptom of a lack of vision of what the purpose, goal or end state is of the educational process. Once this is expressed or explicated, then it seems that the different learning styles and teaching approaches become reconciled – or inconsistencies are exposed and when confronted with these inconsistencies, the teacher and/or learner will make appropriate changes (ie homeostatic process).