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The potential value of student learning research to applied fields cannot be overstated. Research needs to inform educationalists on how students learn with a view to improving teaching/learning systems. This brief review examines the work of major contributors such as Biggs, Marton, Schmeck, Entwistle and in particular Pask, who have looked at both the immediate orientations of learning strategies and at the more permanent phenomena of approaches and learning styles. The author has focused on the early work of these researchers to illustrate the foundation stone on which the research area has been built. Methodology will be examined and the degree to which a balance has been achieved between the conflicting demands of scientific rigour and ecological validity. It is argued that the subtle distinctions and insights drawn within both short term strategies and long term orientations to study were most usefully identified by Gordon Pask.

WE offer our readers the best wishes for the gracious season which is immediately in front of us. As each successive year passes we have repeated this wish, and probably have never done so in circumstances more interesting, and perhaps more encouraging, than those in which we write it to‐day. There is, of course, uncertainty as to the way the Government Committee on Libraries will deal with future library policy. Whispers reach us of possible loss of independence or the possible establishment of a new form of central control. It is too soon even to speculate. At all events, we know the old stultifying days of the penny rate have gone; we know the strides that libraries have made since 1919, in spite of financial difficulties, have been greater than those made in the twenty years before; and we believe it will not be long before the library system of England as a whole may, proportionately to its size, compare its work, and the public appreciation with which that work in regarded, with American libraries.