A conceptual and methodological framework for clustering and correlation analyses of the approaches and study skills inventory for students

The Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students (ASSIST) is a questionnaire that was developed in the ’80s and ’90s with the aim of identifying the ways students study and learn in higher education institutions. It broadly classifies students as approaching their study in a deep, a strategic and/or a surface/apathetic way. A large (N=2029) dataset of the inventory was analysed in this study by using clustering algorithms and correlation analyses of students’ responses. By combining both analyses we show that, in addition to the 3 already identified and well-documented approaches, there exists a 4th approach to studying that emerges from alternative groupings of students’ responses to the items of the inventory and is supported by findings from the k-means clustering algorithm. We term this 4th approach “Dispositional Mindfulness” and find that it is an approach that is associated with gender and year of study and characterises responders to the inventory who pay attention to their present state as students, adapting to their status as higher education students rather than constantly adopting a specific approach to studying. We propose that the Dispositional Mindfulness approach is a primal entity that can be identified, in addition to the other 3 approaches, through the methodological framework that we describe herein and we note that augmenting conventional correlations with k-means clustering can deliver equally interesting findings in the analysis of educational datasets.