| Summary: | Students’ approaches to learning has been classified through their experiences in the design coursework within the larger context of architectural education. What are the learning approaches being adopted by students in architectural design and how does the introduction of the first year design coursework impact on their approaches to learning in the subsequent years are key to this classification. This research reflects on why learning approaches evolve from the first to the final year of the architecture program. Approaches to learning is well-understood in other disciplines including engineering, information technology, mathematics and sciences to name a few, but less-researched in architectural education. This research endeavours to fill this gap. The students are introduced to design theory as a part of their architectural design coursework. This research vehicle of the architectural design is identified as a more appropriate way of classifying learning approaches instead of history, critical theory and technology as design coursework plays a central role in the studio-based program. The academic context has been reviewed through existing literature with a focus on learning approaches within pedagogical research in architectural education, in addition to other fields and disciplines including established research on ‘surface and deep’ approaches in text-based fields through the qualitative research method of phenomenography. This classification is the further consolidation of the pilot study on students’ learning comparing the first and fourth year of the architecture program through phenomenography. The learning context for this classification includes four architectural institutions from the United States of America, United Kingdom and India. The intention of this research is to present the phenomenographic results as meta-categories by depicting the evolution of the learning approaches in architectural design. This research currently intends to further represent these findings and interpret these meta-categories within real world examples of architectural pedagogy and education through an illustrative account of nine students of architecture and their learning approaches in evolution.
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