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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. (Contains 7 tables.)

Students in the fourth semester of basic training programmes in occupational therapy at seven different institutions of higher education in Denmark were surveyed using the Course Experience Questionnaire [CEQ] and the Revised Approaches to Studying Inventory [RASI]. The CEQ proved to be a reasonably robust in this setting: most of the scales demonstrated satisfactory reliability, and a factor analysis confirmed its intended constituent structure. The CEQ also discriminated among students at the seven institutions in their patterns of scores. The RASI proved to be less satisfactory: many subscales did not demonstrate satisfactory reliability and its intended constituent structure was only partly confirmed by factor analysis. Moreover, the RASI failed to discriminate clearly among students at the seven institutions. The scores on the CEQ produced by students at four of the institutions raised concerns relating to the clarity of academic goals and standards, the teaching performance of staff, and the academic workload imposed on students. Nevertheless, students at five institutions produced relatively high ratings of their general satisfaction with their programmes, and students at all seven schools produced high ratings of the appropriateness of their assessments and the acquisition of generic skills. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]