Approaches to learning: an analysis of basic psychometric properties of the Spanish versions of three short questionnaires

The educational model resulted from the integration in the European Higher Education Area demands from the teaching staff to act as managers of the learning context, selecting resources and the appropriate pedagogy among several alternatives. The questionnaires that measure the approaches to learning of students could be a valuable tool in order to make an initial diagnosis of students' characteristics, as well as to assess the impact of pedagogical innovations. Short questionnaires are more demanded by practitioners due to several reasons. Frequently form part of a set of measures, there are resource constraints (time and financial) to administer and process the data, and long questionnaires are more likely to be incompletely answered. Only one version of short questionnaires measuring approaches to learning has been validated in Spanish: the version of the Revised SPQ-2f (Biggs et al., 2001) by Hernandez Pina et al., (2005). This is a 20 items version focusing in two approaches: deep and surface. However, further research (e.g. Entwistle et al., 2002; Fox et al. 2001, or Tait et al., 1998) keep supporting the existence of the third approach: achieving. No short questionnaire measuring these three approaches has been validated in Spanish. In this line the main aim of the paper is to present the basic psychometric properties of the Spanish versions of the three existing short instruments derived from the initial Study Process Questionnaire by Biggs: the Revised SPQ-2f (Biggs et al. 2001), the Short SPQ-3f (Fox et al. 2001) and the N-SPQ-3f (developed by the authors). The results indicate that the Revised SPQ-2f and N-SPQ-3f presented adequate properties, whereas the SPQ-3f shows reliability problems. Our results also suggest that there is support to consider the achieving approach as an independent construct (contrariwise to the opinion of Biggs et al., 2001, when developing the R-SPQ-2f). Therefore, in degrees where motivation is mainly external, the use of a 2 factor instrument could result in an incomplete view of the approaches to learning of students.