SummaryThree exploratory studies are reported which extend the work on approaches to learning carried out by Marton and his colleagues in Gothenburg. The main aim of the studies was to develop a questionnaire to investigate the way students approach the task of reading an academic article. Marton had distinguished between ‘deep’ and ‘surface’ approaches, and a coding procedure has been developed to obtain similar categories from questionnaires. These exploratory studies, while not producing statistically convincing results, did confirm the pattern of findings reported by Marton and suggest ways in which his explanatory constructs could be elaborated to take account of the styles of learning adopted by s