For the last two decades research in the field of university students’ approaches to learning has repeatedly used the Study Process Questionnaire- SPQ (Biggs, 1987) in a wide range of educational settings. As a result deep and surface approaches to learning emerged and remain as conceptual and empirically consolidated constructs in educational research. Richardson (2004) points out that scores on SPQ have showed reasonable stability over time, moderate convergent validity with other questionnaires, and reasonable levels of both discriminating power and criterion-related validity. Nevertheless, both the evidence on the internal consistency of its scales and the factorial validity have been variable.

After more than twenty years using the Study Process Questionnaire (SPQ) it seems necessary to update and improve the survey structure; that is why a reduced version of the SPQ (R-SPQ-2F) has been proposed (Biggs, Kember and Leung, 2001). Nowadays the R-SPQ-2F is widely used in many different countries (e.g. Baeten, Dochy and Struyven, 2008; Gijbels, de Watering, Dochy and den Bossche, 2005; Gijbels and Dochy, 2006; Justicia, Pichardo, Berbén and De la Fuente, 2008; Leung, Ginns and Kember, 2008; Skogsberg and Clump, 2003).

However, the results obtained using the R-SPQ-2F does not merge well with those obtained using the SPQ, and so at the present there is still limited evidence about the psychometric properties of the new instrument. Consequently additional evidence on the internal structure of the questionnaire is needed especially through survey applications to students following different academic disciplines and also developing a cross-cultural research so as to generalize the factorial validity of this new instrument.

 In this context, this research aims to:

1.      Adapt the R-SPQ-2F to the German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese languages using a back-translation method under the supervision of John Biggs, the original author of the instrument.

2.      Examine the internal structure of the R-SPQ-2F in different cultural and academic contexts and in samples of German, Spanish, French, English, Italian and Portuguese university students following different degrees.

The research plan is divided into two parts. The first one has already been completed producing different language versions of the R-SPQ-2F and examining its psychometric properties in a large and diverse Spanish sample. The second part is currently being developed to extend the empirical results of Spanish university students’ approaches to learning to a wider, international population (German, French, English, Italian and Portuguese students). The Association of Catholic Institutes of Education (ACISE), the sectorial group of education of the International Federation of Catholic Universities (IFCU), will support the empirical development of the project so that preliminary results of the second phase are expected shortly.

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