Do university students with more critical and creative thinking have deep learning approaches? This is the research question that guides our work. We believe that this relationship does exist and that students with more critical and creative thinking prefer deep learning approaches. The objective of this work is to check whether such relationship exists within university students in the selected sample.

The results here enclosed are derived from a three-year research whose goals are obviously broader[1].

            We understand the critical and creative thinking as Kember and Leung (2005) do, who interpret it as the ability to develop alternative viewpoints, to use their own initiative and their own ideas in order to interpret the reality, as assessed in the SEQ questionnaire (Student Engagement Questionnaire) (Kember & Leung, 2009).

Underlying learning theories in the Bologna process of convergence, defend a university pedagogy focused on learning/learner-centered (student-centered learning, learning paradigm) (Attard, Di Iorio, Geven & Santa, 2010, Biggs, 2005; Kember, 2009; Monereo and Pozo, 2003; Samuelowicz & Bain, 2001).

In this model student learning is the key element of the process, but there is also recognition of the changed role of the teacher (Attard et al., 2010). The teacher must act as a mediator, as a designer of learning environments that promote the independent learning of students -which requires teaching skills-, compared to traditional models where the teacher is focused on the knowledge of content and conveying that knowledge to students.

The development of this model also requires a change in the role of the student, from being a “receiver” and” repeater” of the knowledge transmitted by the teacher, to being a subject actively involved in the learning process. In this model students must be actively involved making the learning process significant (Machemer and Crawford, 2007) and develop a deep approach to learning.

Approaches to learning are understood to be learning processes which learners establish in order to deal with an academic task, and they originate from the learners’ perceptions of the task and from their attributes (Entwistle & Peterson, 2004). This concept offers elements that are both situational and personal (Biggs, 1988 and 1993): when a student is faced with a task, two basic questions are raised: what do I want to accomplish with this? What can I do to accomplish it? The former refers to challenges and motives, while the latter corresponds to the strategies and resources to achieve them (McCune & Entwistle, 2011): thus, learning approaches are based on motives and adopt certain strategies. The typology which we endorse is that which postulates that there are two approaches: deep and surface (Biggs, 1993).

The relevance of the matter derives from the impact that learning approaches have on academic achievement. There is information deriving from different research works in different countries: Valle et al. (2000), Biggs (1987), Zeegers (2001), Muñoz and Gómez (2005), Gargallo et al. (2006), De la Fuente et al.  (2008).

In our opinion, if critical and creative thinking influence the approaches to learning of students, as we think, we can offer to other Spanish and European universities relevant data and training proposals of interest. We are working in our research using and assessing learner-centered methods that can develop critical and creative thinking and also deep ap

[1] It is the "Learning-centered methodologies at the university. Design, implementation and assessment”, approved by the Spanish Economy and Competitiveness’ Ministry into the National Basic Research Program, 2001 (2013-2015) (Financing Plan E, PGE), directed by Professor Ph.D. Bernardo Gargallo (code EDU2012-32725).

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