ABSTRACT
When people go about learning they bring with them a wide range of individual differences. Learners with a ‘surface approach’ are motivated to meet minimal course requirements and achieve their goals by rote learning and strategies designed just to reproduce what they have learned. The relationships between total ground school scores and Surface, Deep, and Achieving Approach as well as the Surface Achieving and Deep Achieving scores showed consistently that the adoption of rote learning strategies and minimal-effort motives were harmful to overall performance. The new instrument, the Pilot Learning Process Questionnaire was based, like that of Biggs, on notions of Surface, Deep and Achieving for both motives and strategies. While the pattern of findings with the experienced pilots and the student pilots differs, the results are in theoretically defendable directions, especially the findings that being deep is helpful for certain types of complex learning.
