Perceived Academic Quality and Approaches to Studying in Higher Education: Evidence from Danish Students of Occupational Therapy

Abstract

It has been well established that there is an intimate relationship between individual students’ perceptions of the academic quality of their courses and the approaches to studying that they adopt on those courses. Entwistle and Ramsden predicted that the relationship would be even stronger at the aggregate (cohort) level. The Course Experience Questionnaire and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory were completed by 19 cohorts of students at seven schools of occupational therapy in Denmark. The overlap in variance between their scores on the two instruments was 39.5% at the individual level and 89.0% at the cohort level, supporting Entwistle and Ramsden’s prediction. The pattern of relationships was different in the two cases, suggesting that the underlying causal relationships might be different, too.