3.1 Academic skills
We hope that one result of studying this course is that you will feel more confident about using your academic skills. In this course, these skills include:
- reading for meaning
- note taking
- writing in an academic way that includes different points of view
- selecting and using evidence
- evaluating ideas (including your own plans) and theories, including information found on the web
- thinking about your own learning (reflection).
However, referring to these skills as ‘academic’ creates the risk that they are seen as useful only for a course of study. In this sense, they might be seen as part of a surface or, perhaps, a strategic approach to learning.
Yet all the academic skills that are listed above can be useful in other situations. For example, when you read something like a cookbook or a newspaper article, it is likely that you are reading to understand the main points about how to cook something or about a topic in the news.
There are also situations in real life where you might have to take notes or summarise key points. This occurs in many occupations; for example, where it is useful to have notes about decisions reached at a meeting. To take these notes, you have to select which parts of the discussion are important. Although you may have to use written communication in many areas of your life, it is probably true that writing in an academic style is perhaps the most specialised of these academic skills. For example, the assignments for a course of study are not the same as other types of writing. They have their own rules, which may include, for example, the need for an introductory paragraph in an essay or the need to include references indicating where ideas and quotes have come from. Submitting assignments will give you a clearer understanding of some of these conventions about academic writing, such as the value of using concise and clear sentences. You are not be expected to learn them all at once. On this course there are no long written assignments of the sort you will meet if you go on to further, more formal, study.
Activity 21: Reflecting on how you have used academic skills
This activity is an opportunity to reflect on some of the academic skills that you have used while studying this course. In order to do this:
- Select two activities from this course for which you developed new skills.
- Draw up a table similar to the one below.
- For each activity, identify and record the academic skills that you used and any other ways you could use those skills.
| Activity from this course | What academic skills did I use? | Are there any other ways I could use this skill? |
|---|---|---|
| Activity 8: Exploring learning theories | ‘Reading’: I read this a couple of times to really try and understand the key points. | My daughter’s school has just been evaluated. I want to read the report to understand why the school did not do very well. |
| Activity 8: Exploring learning theories | ‘Note taking’: I took notes about what I thought was important in the overview of theories. | I might need to take some notes on the report to explain it to my partner. |
Comment
Hopefully, completing this activity will help reinforce the idea that so-called academic skills can be useful in other situations, too.
Developing these skills is not very different from the situation faced by anyone who takes up a new interest. So do not be afraid about getting it slightly wrong to start with. After all trial and error can be a good way to learn, as long as you can see some value in making the errors and have the chance to move on from them. It can also help to have support and feedback from other people, as discussed at various points in this course. For example, the members of a community of practice may be able to help you in adapting your existing skills for use in a new situation.
Shehnaz, one of our original case studies, also discusses the ways in which academic skills can overlap with real-world skills, as shown in this video clip.
Transcript: Shehnaz
You’ll look at ‘real-world’ skills again in the next section.