Spearhead academic skills

There is a strong need for an interfaculty think tank that will brainstorm on practising and testing academic skills in tutorials and list best practices.

Spearhead Academic Skills

With my project I aim to optimise the content of the contact hours of seminars in order to improve students’ academic skills. The project initially focuses on the Art History programme, but, the teaching material I have developed is easy to use for many other programmes.

The project has been set up because academic skills are currently tested in tutorials (assessment of a research proposal, a lecture, or a paper), but they are hardly ever practised. The main reason for the shortage of occasions for practice or improvement is the lack of good teaching material for academic skills.

For one year, A working group has been put together consisting of a recently graduated student of academic teaching and Dutch, and a Research Master’s student of Arts and Culture. Under my direction, the working group made an inventory of the current teaching material used for the Art History programme and the needs of teachers and students with regard to new teaching material. The seminar also looked for best practices in other Leiden University programmes based on suggestions by other Teaching Fellows. Then, they developed instructions and exercises and tests that addressed specific academic skills, such as formulating research questions, structuring arguments, and in particular stimulating creative thinking - an academic skill that is often neglected.

Progress of the project

Inventory
The inventory has shown that teaching material for seminars, in particular for second-year students, lacks practice material for academic skills. Consequently, there are no occasions to practise or improve these skills. The project therefore focuses exclusively on second-year seminars; there are teaching materials for first-year students that explain what academic skills are, and thesis seminars are currently being developed for third-year students so that they can work towards their BA thesis step by step. The training of academic skills in second-year seminars (of 5 EC) must be improved.

Student assistant
In January 2015 I appointed a student assistant for 0.2 FTE. This modest contract within LTA may take up to three years. The student assistant started with the inventory of current teaching material in seminars with regards to academic skills of both the BA and MA Art History. Moreover, there was a demand for teaching material in this area from related study programmes.

Focal points
After the inventory, we selected five focal points for the first six lectures of a BA2 tutorial that started as a pilot project in September 2015:

• Research questions;
• Writing style;
• Introduction and research proposal;
• Structure of argument;
• Conclusions;
• Creativity in academic research.

New teaching material
The research material that I developed together with my student assistant, consists of the following:

• Hand-out on ‘Academic Skills’: a list of academic skills in general, and elaborated to art-historical research;
• Diagnostic test: in the first lecture students were given 20 multiple choice questions to test their level of academic skills;
• Hand-out on ‘Research Questions’: for example, how to go from topic to research question, types of questions, examples of good and bad questions with explanations, and the do’s and don’ts. Exercise: formulate various research questions for a given subject of research. In-seminar discussion on results;
• Hand-out on ‘Writing Style’ with an exercise for the next lecture;
• Hand-out ‘Introduction’ with exercise to analyse introductions of several publications;
• Hand-out ‘Structure of Argument and Conclusions’ with exercise to analyse literature;
• Hand-out ‘Creativity in academic research’ with an exercise.

Method

Second-year students attending the seminar that started in September, were invited to make suggestions for improvements of and additions to the teaching material that will be a ‘work in progress’ for some time.

The small exercises that students are asked to do, were sent to a fellow participant prior to the seminar. For each seminar, we developed a different method to discuss the results of exercises in order to avoid routine. 

The next six seminars will be devoted to literature search in order to set up a transparent argument and to answer research questions. For this, we will design another set of hand-outs. Furthermore, students will be prepared for their final thesis.

National congress
I helped organise a national congress on academic skills with my student assistant, that was held by the NACV in the Lipsius building of Leiden University on 29 January 2016. Approximately 150 colleagues from universities of applied sciences and universities throughout the Netherlands attended this congress.

Helen Westgeest (Faculty of Humanities, Art History)

'There is a strong need for an interfaculty think tank that will brainstorm on practising and testing academic skills in tutorials and list best practices.’

‘As a Fellow of the Teachers’ Academy I want to contribute to the interfaculty think tank. In the past years, educational improvements focused particularly on the intensifying the use of ICT. I would like to draw attention to the ‘how and what’, with regard to the contact hours of the tutorials are used and the related tasks of students. As a member of the Studium Generale advisory committee and the LUF International Study Fund, I have good experiences with interfaculty committees.’