Symposium: Learning Processes and Strategies—iii

SUMMARY. Detailed information was collected by interview from a sample of 30 first‐year education students, who took part in a learning experiment and described their approaches to their normal studies. It was found that the distinction between holistic and atomistic cognitive approaches was consistent over different occasions when students were asked to read and to recall their knowledge of the two texts in the experiment. This concept of cognitive approach also had a functional relationship with academic attainment, helping to explain not only examination success, but also other aspects of the students' approaches to studying.