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Approaches to Learning or Levels of Processing: What Did Marton and Säljö (1976a) Really Say? The Legacy of the Work of the Göteborg Group in the 1970s

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Abstract

Marton and Säljö (Br J Educ Psychol 46:4–11, 1976a) described deep-level and surface-level processing in experiments in which students read and recalled academic texts. They did not discuss whether levels of processing had any counterparts in students’ everyday studies. However, their article is often credited as the source of the distinction between deep and surface approaches to learning in students’ academic studies. It is also sometimes credited as the source of the research method known as “phenomenography.” These incorrect accounts are attributed to Marton and Säljö’s subsequent writings, which promoted the use of “approaches to learning” in order to characterize differences in the process of learning in both artificial experiments and academic studying and also promoted the use of “phenomenography” to refer to any form of rigorous qualitative analysis involving the identification of categories of description and the relationships between them. Even so, there is an important conceptual, theoretical, and methodological distinction between students’ levels of processing in specific tasks and their approaches to learning in their academic studies. Marton and Säljö’s article served to illuminate the former but did not discuss the latter. The only correct source of the notion of approaches to learning in students’ academic studies in higher education is a different paper by Marton (in: Strategies for research and development in higher education, 1976c). Citing Marton and Säljö’s article as the source is not only inaccurate but obscures important aspects of their methodology.

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Notes

  1. The expressions “the sign” and “what is signified” appear to constitute an oblique reference to the distinction between signifié and signifiant in the writings of de Saussure (1916/1955, p. 99; 1916/1959, p. 67), though for Saussure the former was spoken rather than written. Elsewhere, Marton (1976b) discussed the various ramifications of his distinction between “the sign” and “what is signified,” but, as Richardson (2000, p. 20) commented, he never explored nor even acknowledged the Saussurian connotation in his subsequent writings.

  2. Meyer and Shanahan (2002) later argued that the excerpts from interview transcripts that had been presented by Dahlgren and Marton (1978) did not provide unambiguous support for the categories of description that they claimed to have found.

  3. The term phenomenography had been previously coined by Sonnemann (1954, p. 344) to characterize the approach to phenomenology taken by the psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1932). Jaspers had confined himself to the descriptive recording of a patient’s immediate subjective experience without seeking any psychodynamic interpretation of that experience. However, this idea subsequently found no favor among those phenomenologists who were influenced by existentialism, such as Binswanger (1962, pp. 192–194), Needleman (1963, pp. 36–39), Protti (1974) and Sonnemann himself, all of whom believed that phenomenology should provide a philosophical explanation of a person’s experience and not merely a description. These authors were all writing before Marton (1981) reintroduced the term, and so, contrary to a suggestion made by Hasselgren and Beach (1997), their criticisms cannot be taken to apply to Marton’s work. However, the phenomenological psychologist, Giorgi (1970, p. 80), was familiar with Sonnemann’s work, and according to Dall’Alba (1996) it was Giorgi who noted a broad similarity between Sonnemann’s notion of phenomenography and the approach adopted by the Göteborg group. Biggs (1999) also described Marton as having “resurrected” Sonnemann’s term (p. 22). Even so, when Marton (1995) discussed certain misconceptions about phenomenography, he did not mention Sonnemann at all. The same was true in the case of Giorgi (1999) when he came to compare Marton’s phenomenography with the perspective of phenomenology. These considerations suggest that the link between Marton’s notion and Sonnemann’s is tenuous at best.

  4. It should be acknowledged, however, that other researchers have continued to maintain that phenomenography is a distinctive research orientation and not simply an analytic method (see, e.g., Svensson 1997). Moreover, the last 15 years have seen increased diversity in the kind of methods employed by phenomenographic researchers, initially under the heading of the “new phenomenography” and subsequently with the label of “variation theory” (see, e.g., Åkerlind 2005; Pang 2003; Tan 2009).

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Acknowledgments

I am most grateful to Noel Entwistle, James Hartley, Sari Lindblom-Ylänne, Ference Marton, Erik Meyer and Lennart Svensson for comments on previous drafts of this article and to Alan Baddeley, Fergus Craik, and Stephan Mertens for their helpful advice.

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The author declares that he has no conflict of interest.

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    John T. E. Richardson

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Richardson, J.T.E. Approaches to Learning or Levels of Processing: What Did Marton and Säljö (1976a) Really Say? The Legacy of the Work of the Göteborg Group in the 1970s. Interchange 46, 239–269 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10780-015-9251-9

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