Approaches to Studying and Levels of Processing in University Students

S ummary . Attempts at measuring students' study styles and strategies have been derived from different theoretical standpoints. Traditionally these have emerged from a combination of mainstream psychology and personal experience. More recently concepts have been derived from the qualitative analysis of students' experiences of studying and subsequently operationalised through inventories. This study compares the dimensions emerging from these two contrasting approaches. A sample of 218 mainly first‐year university students were given shortened versions of two inventories, one based on concepts from cognitive psychology and the other from educational research. Correlations between subscales from the two inventories, and factor analyses of them, are reported which show substantial agreement between the main concepts used from the two theoretical traditions to describe study strategies.