Abstract:

The challenge faced in most university undergraduate provision is how to nurture enhanced academic writing skills, among first year cohorts, by students second year of study, .i.e. the year in which assessment results usually start to impact final degree classification in many UK universities. This challenge is all the more pressing given the correlation between HE funding, degree classification and the related student employment destination data; national student satisfaction scores, including the UK National Student Survey (NSS); Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) and league tables (.e.g. THE). The overall profile of such league table performances, for any University, also impacts student intake numbers - and so the cycle continues. As such more ways are needed to create meaningful academic advantage for students, to distinguish Universities from one another. Against this backdrop, this paper will advance the case for embedding academic writing skills within a first term, first year undergraduate module for 300 students in a UK University. It highlights the default position within most UK HE institutions, is to adopt a centralised specialist unit approach that serves a multitude of faculty and disciplines. The approach demonstrated here, rather, challenges that view and instead seeks to illustrate the benefits of not only embedding writing support in the pedagogical design of a first year undergraduate module, but to accelerate student engagement and their academic success, by providing specialist intradisciplinary lectures and a choice of assessment questions. The paper also advocates that the intradisciplinary nature of such choice, reflects the curriculum themes students will encounter during the remainder of their degree. As the module in question is also part of a common first year taken by students from four undergraduate degrees, this intradisciplinary approach, also succeeds in exposing students to academic disciplines and assessment questions, they would not otherwise have been motivated to engage with. As such, this paper seeks to advance previous work by the author to explore the benefits of providing variety in assessment design as an aid to motivating students in applying their best approach to academic writing and to give them part ownership of the task through the personal choice they make. The work of Matsouka and Mihail (2016) will be examined which plays a crucial role in accelerating students’ understanding of why academic writing is important to their career prospects. This paper also seeks to advance the work of Windgate, Andon and Congo (2011) as well as that of Mostert and Townsend (2018) by adding an intradisciplinary approach to the ongoing and multilayered academic writing support advocated by the authors. Evidence of improved first year undergraduate academic writing performance, as a result of this approach, will also be evidenced in this paper along with improved student satisfaction scores. To balance this argument, time will also be taken to reflect on the challenges of embedding academic writing skills, including the level of willingness among academics to teach in this area and stereotypical and limiting remedial labels posited among some students and academic staff. Finally, the paper will conclude by advocating that through an intradisciplinary approach to academic writing - challenges can be overcome and help to embed the skill successfully.

Keywords:

Academic writing, undergraduate, first year, intradisciplinary, business and management, pedagogy, curriculum design.