INDIVIDUAL DIVERSITY IN EFFECTIVE STUDYING - INTRODUCTION TO THE SPECIAL ISSUE

This Special Issue harl its origins in two symposia on studying in hig her education. One took place within the Third European Congress of Ps ychology in Tampere, Finland in July, 1994, while the other was part o f the Fifth Conference of the European Association for Research on Lea rning and Instruction (EARLI) in Aix-en-Provence (France) in September 1994. From these two symposia, papers were selected which were suffic iently coherent to form the basis of a Special Issue of Higher Educati on. Authors were invited to rewrite their papers and this led to a yea r of co-operation (sustained by e-mail) between Helsinki (Finland), Ti lburg (the Netherlands), Edinburgh (Scotland), Carbondale (Illinois, U S), Cape Town (South Africa) and Leuven (Belgium). The Special Issue p resents six papers. From an initial variety of perspectives came the g radual recognition that all six dealt, essentially, with three main th emes: (1) a description of the reality of everyday studying; (2) the i dentification of underlying structures within that reality; and (3) th e improvement of students' study effectiveness in practice. Taken toge ther these three themes suggested the title: Individual diversity in e ffective studying.