‘Study skills”, “academic skills”, “study support”: whatever you call them, units such as these are commonplace in higher education.
Delivered from centralised units commonly based in the library, such support for students, in the words of one university, aims to offer “a wealth of resources for both home and international students who want to make the transition between ordinary English and the academic language expected from you in your work at university”.
Some library services even have mascots such as Worcester University Library Services’ Reffie the Referencing Raptor. Some go further, with peripatetic workshops that offer to embed academic skills into specific subjects.
In essence, this whole system is saying: you may be coming from a background that means academic work is challenging or unfamiliar to you, or you may be struggling with your assessments and how to approach them. Don’t worry, the support exists to help you.
We want to emphasise here exactly what this is promising and the high stakes nature and importance of it. We’d argue that these claims and the support approaches they recommend have to be underpinned by a number of key tenets in order for them to be pedagogically viable, and these tenets have to be ones that those delivering and accessing the support believe in (otherwise the whole foundations of the system collapse).
- What the centres are delivering has to be definable – because if it isn’t, they’ll all be doing different things.
- What the centres are teaching has to be of transferable relevance to all subject areas – because if it isn’t, there is little point in teaching it as it won’t be relevant for all students.
- Centres must be able to embed study skills into different subject areas – if they cannot, then what would be the value in trying to do this?
- Students’ success must be in some way the result of them having successfully attained study skills – because if it wasn’t, what would be the point in them spending time learning them?
In our view, each of these tenets are baseless from a pedagogical perspective.
Immovable, unknowable, ineffable
With regard to the first, nothing that these centres offer is definable, because they are called different names and all subjects approach them in their own unique ways. For example, the way that a nursing student is expected to “critically analyse” a procedure will involve completely different abilities and knowledge from the way a mechanical engineering student is expected to “critically analyse” a procedure.
If both students went to the skills hub and it was suggested they attend a study skills class, it would have to be assumed that the same class for such diverse subjects can teach them to “critically analyse” in their respective subjects.
At the same time, these “skills” do not transfer, not only because they differ across subject areas but also because they are likely not even “skills” at all and would be better described as abilities or knowledge.
We have heard as much from students themselves. In fact the only thing that we have found that students really value is actual subject help, from experts. Recent sites run by and for UK university student communities feature students complaining that study skills units failed to improve their academic success.
For example, this quote found on the Student Room from a student on a study skills bridging course illustrates the issue:
If S[tudy] S[kills] assignments helped you with the academic subject assignments, perhaps they’d be worthwhile. But I just found them to be a completely separate entity and they didn’t help with the real assignments, they just took my time and focus off them!
In other words, any attempt to embed study skills is akin to trying to “embed” a maths course into a course on the history of renaissance art.
If a student performs well, if they present well, or they do a report well, it’s not because they have good study skills, rather, it’s because they know their subject. If one of us were to give a presentation on the reasons why Nazi Germany’s Operation Blau offensive in the Soviet Union in 1942 failed, we could do so because we know the subject.
If we were instead to attempt a presentation on why the recent helicopter flight on Mars succeeded, we would not be able to do so. For someone to suggest to us that we could do the first because we had good study skills and couldn’t do the latter because we had poor study skills would seem preposterous and the purest example that springs to our minds of one of Nietzsche’s four great errors of confusing cause and effect.
Help where students truly need it
It would be great if such a one-size-suits-all approach did exist, this is a fantasy that encourages users to believe and clap their hands. Perhaps somewhat underwhelmingly, we suggest that the action that students, lecturers, institutions, and HE in general need to take is … to provide support in the subject.
We need to forget any illusions of “study skills” that universities can cheaply and conveniently deliver and are transferable across all areas and, instead, teach the subject.
This means that centralised units need to be decentralised, more people need to be employed on academic contracts to teach the subjects themselves, and that all study skills specialists need to be teaching actual academic subjects.
If students are struggling or need support in their degrees, they don’t need more study skills, they need help with the subjects of their degrees. Because subject knowledge is what creates success and it is this students need help with.
If these centres don’t actually help students, then why are they there? We explore the question of whose interests these centres actually serve in our article for Teaching in Higher Education: “Study Skills: neoliberalism’s perfect Tinkerbell.”
I might be biased because my partner is an academic skills advisor, but I would disagree with a lot of this. I work for an SU Advice service advising on appeals and mitigating circumstances and so many students I see struggle with writing a clear, well structured and compelling argument to explain how their personal circumstances have affected their academic work. The students have the ‘subject knowledge’ in this instance since the subject they are writing about is their own experience and no-one knows what they went through better than they do themselves. Yet it’s all too common for their… Read more »
The example of a successful presentation here is an odd one. Yes, subject knowledge is essential for the presentation to be a success, but surely there is a ‘skills’ element to it as well? The student can know the subject inside out, but if they don’t know how to plan, structure or deliver a presentation, they’re not going to do too well? Most mark schemes will have a bit more than ‘Displayed excellent and wide ranging knowledge of the subject matter’. I do agree that there can be challenges with centralised ‘skills support’, as it is often too easy to… Read more »
Quite annoyed to see Worcester’s study skills offer so badly misrepresented. Yes there are generic sessions on topics like referencing but there is also deep subject-specific support from academic liaison librarians who are actually very well embedded in their academic Schools and in many cases considered to be a core part of the course team. Your example of referencing trips you up, speaking as a librarian if there’s one thing that needs delivering in a consistent way it’s referencing and I’ve seen plenty of examples of academics doing a frankly awful job, getting aspects of their own subject area’s referencing… Read more »
Well said Phil. One of the things we have learned from the Covid experience is the value of professional services roles, such as librarians, working with teaching academics to support students with their academic skills, be they delivered through study skills centres or as part of academic library liaison work. In particular, librarians know how to get the best out of digital resources that students need, such as e-books and databases, in a way that academics often simply don’t. My background is HE but I currently work primarily with FE colleges, many of whose students are making the leap into… Read more »
Thank you for this article. Are current centralised study skills fit for purpose? No, I don’t think so. Should we give up on trying to teach students how to study effectively? No, we just need to do it in a more scholarly, integrated and convincing way. The main contention of this piece appears to be that centralised generic study skills provisions are not fit for purpose, predominantly because of their “one size fits all approach” and the fact that they are often divorced from subject content. Very similar points were made by Wingate (2006) in an article called “Down with… Read more »
This article comes across as setting up a straw person to rail against organisational structures and practices more than address what is the underlying issue which I take to be what Paul Penn notes, that we need to be more scholarly. Indeed I like to think of Universities as inclusive networks of scholarly practitioners in which all staff and all students are able to make contributions to their community of scholarly practice and can learn about and develop their personal scholarship within and across the network of communities. By acknowledging students as also being scholars we fit in with the… Read more »
In making the above observations I would stress that my intention is not to criticise or undermine the efforts of the dedicated and hardworking folks (be they lecturers, librarians, specialists or other support staff) that are trying to help students succeed. I’m conscious that it’s easy for institutional level criticism to be misconstrued as a swipe at the staff on the frontline, which can be very demoralising. Rather, my intention is to highlight the institutional level need for teaching and learning policy to commit to meaningfully embed the scholarship related to effective studying into their support provisions and provide adequate… Read more »
thanks Paul – and as you know, I’ve long been pushing for Learning Development to be professionalised with appropriate, evidence-based expertise, rather than the ‘you’ve done a degree, you can teach others how to!’ low-skilled basis and pedagogically problematic ‘giving students the skills’ discourse on which many of these roles are constituted, if not actually enacted. The issue really is with how this provision is constructed and positioned at that institutional level, as there is much excellent practice at the front line, and a genuine space for those who can act as skilled intermediaries helping surface what academic colleagues may… Read more »
The article is very pertinent and wise. Study skills could and should be taught within the home discipline of students. Gaps between students on the same courses are generally knowledge as well as skills-related and they should be dealt with by the home department.
Too many students complain that the Study Skills tutors are overly dogmatic and generally miss the point as they are at best “generalists”.
I have never commented upon a WonkHE article before but I feel compelled to share my views about this article. I get the sense that the author’s have a very narrow view of “study skills” support and what those teams might accomplish at Edinburgh Napier. In fact, I go as far as to urge the authors to really engage and understand what these experts do at their institution. They are not “support” staff who are just messing about with study skills. These professional experts who spend their careers teaching, undertaking scholarly practice and publishing research about what they do. This… Read more »
Kate – your article says causality cannot be claimed, but here you are claiming causality. Here is what your article says: “One of the limitations of this study is that of causality. While there are differences in attainment for students who have tutorials with Learning Development, we cannot say that is it the tutorials that caused this. It is possible that students who have tutorials with Learning Development are of a higher attainment level before seeing the team or the fact that they have chosen to seek support means that they are already engaged in the learning process.” I work… Read more »
Interesting points, James. Could you share the relevant studies “with control groups [which] tend to show no impact”? It can be challenging to set up ethical research in education which uses meaningful control groups, so I’d be very interested to see the body of research to which you refer. Your implied criticism of Kate for publishing in a journal within her area of work seems a little harsh considering normal conventions of academia follow this pattern. You’re right to say that evidence (solely?) based on testimonials is flawed. For this reason it is surprising that the authors of this WonkHE… Read more »
S. White – there is a paucity of literature with control groups it seems – it’s almost impossible to do. The authors’ ‘Tinkerbell’ article refers to Ramsden, 1987 and that is all, so its neither overwhelming nor up-to-date. The only other one I know is Conway and Ross (1984) – Getting what you want by revising what you had. They chose to look at a study skills program as an example of cognitive dissonance experienced by participants. This is interesting on why user testimonials are flawed. You might find something in Gibbs (1981) book ‘Teaching students to learn’ which has… Read more »
Interesting points James. It can be challenging to set up ethical studies involving meaningful control groups in education. I’d be very interested to see the body of research you mention which does so if you wouldn’t mind sharing. It seems harsh to criticise Kate for publishing within her area of work given that within academia this is common practice. You rightly state that ‘evidence based [solely?] on testimonials is flawed’. It is worth noting that in the original WonkHE article the authors make strident claims based only on a single piece of testimonial evidence. Though it’s necessary and useful to… Read more »
Study Skills are a shibboleth; the term is at least twenty years out of date and fails to adequately conceptualise the work of practitioners in the field. Very few of us would recognise the bolt-on, generic support (see Wingate) described in this blog as constitutive of recent learning development practice. It is, however, often indicative of how our practice is conceptualised by senior management within our institutions. It’s easy to promote a centralised, one size-fits-all approach and claim that this blanket approach will resolve some of the long-standing issues described above. But, as Helen Webster succinctly notes above, the issue… Read more »
“In our view, each of these tenets are baseless from a pedagogical perspective.” I refer you to your own library page on critical thinking. Including a list of books on the right column from various professionals addressing the tenets, likely from a pedagogical perspective. https://libguides.napier.ac.uk/criticalthinking/reflect “At the same time, these “skills” do not transfer, not only because they differ across subject areas but also because they are likely not even “skills” at all and would be better described as abilities or knowledge.” Define skills? “the ability to do something well; expertise.” Would you describe your ABILITY to write this article… Read more »
The authors of this article show little understanding of teaching and learning theories and seem to espouse an ’empty vessel to be filled’ method of educating. What do they mean by ‘if they know their subject…’? If a student writes a paper because they ‘know the subject’, where do they learn skills of rhetoric, debate, different styles of discourse etc. etc. Ah, yes – some schools teach this; some students develop this at school. Sadly, many were not taught this at school, or perhaps were not ready for such cognitive processing development when they were in school. Students’ requests for… Read more »
While I agree with part of this – namely the issue of consistency and definitions across the academic skills field – the majority of this paper suggests the writers could do with a session in critical thinking…! I don’t think taking a single comment from The Student Room (which talks about a whole module, not academic skills support in general) is very good journalism. On top of this, statements like the following are simply untrue: “If a student performs well, if they present well, or they do a report well, it’s not because they have good study skills, rather, it’s… Read more »
A slightly thought provoking article, yet not convincing, and not evidencing critique in the way it’s written. As someone who has taught dedicated ‘stand-alone’ study skills modules and modules where study skills are embedded, my view is that study skills usually need embedding, within disciplinary contexts, yet there is a clear role for more generic study and learning skills (such as grammar, spelling, using apostrophes correctly, using spellcheck function and so on). My preference is to use the term ‘learning skills’, rather than study skills.
This may be the least persuasive article I’ve ever read on WonkHE. In the past, I’ve taught both within a discipline (History) and in what would probably be called a study skills unit, and the authors don’t seem to understand what the latter do. The entire article sets up a strawman and knocks it down. Barely any research evidence is given, either here or in the fuller article available via the link. The only piece of evidence here – the quote from the Student Room – is from a wider comment which is actually about a specific study skills module… Read more »
Thank you to all who have commented. We are very pleased to see the debate the piece has generated. We want to respond with the following: 1. We feel the piece has been considered as constituting an attack on the individuals in Study Skills units and who deliver Study Skills. This was not the intention and certainly is not what we think. We would like to quote from the paper the article is linked to – suggesting that what needs to be done is the following: “This would involve, we suggest, employing greater numbers of subject specialists to help deliver… Read more »
You’ve written it so nicely, and you’ve come up with some great ideas. This is a fantastic post!