Lecturer in Psychology, Advanced Research Methods
Acquiring written communication skills at an advanced level is part and parcel of many university degrees. While a large part of university level education will revolve around acquiring subject-specific knowledge, a crucial transferable skill students are expected to acquire involves learning how to communicate that subject knowledge to a variety of audiences in a range of formats. Writing skills are therefore also one of the key graduate attributes for Queen Mary students.
Psychology is no different when it comes to expecting these writing skills: in fact, it might rely more on developing these skills in different formats than is generally expected in other university degrees. A particular format of writing that is especially crucial throughout the BSc Psychology at QMUL, is that of essay writing. It is not just key as a graduate attribute, but it comes back all throughout the degree in the form of coursework essays and essay-based exams. While our students are generally strong writers in the more fixed-structure formats such as lab reports, essay writing is a known difficulty raised by both staff and students.
Our student body consists of students with a wide variety of backgrounds, resulting in diverse levels of experience in pre-university writing skills. Evening out this diverse skill level is a challenging task, and one that will require work throughout the entire degree. This project aims to explore possibilities of strengthening the students’ essay writing skills early on, in the first year of their Psychology degree, to better equip them throughout their degree. It will do this in the form of a scaffolded approach to embedding essay writing skills in first year, by investigating the effect of practical exercise tasks. This way it starts students off with a solid foundation on which to build throughout the degree.
The practical exercises will consist of relatively short, scaffolded tasks that will make students engage practically with different elements of essay writing, such as critical evaluation of sources, referencing those sources appropriately, and constructing paragraph structure.
This project will aim to try to find a balance between generalisability of academic writing skills for university students more broadly, while focusing on scaffolding those specific key features required for Psychology degrees. This action research will implement practical exercises focusing on various aspects of essay writing into the tutorial sessions of an academic skills module. The practical exercises will consist of relatively short, scaffolded tasks that will make students engage practically with different elements of essay writing, such as critical evaluation of sources, referencing those sources appropriately, and constructing paragraph structure. The exercises will be delivered in small group tutorials to enable maximum interactivity, and students will work individually as well as in pairs and groups to make the most use of peer feedback. During those tutorials, academic staff are present to help students perform the task, and walk through the exercise, as well as to provide extra support. Across the different tutorial sessions, through means of these practical exercise tasks, students are taken step-by-step through what it takes to write to a coherent essay.
It has shown to be tricky to have students and staff agree on the improvements they observe. To account for these differences in evaluating the action, improvement to teaching practice will be evaluated using three questions: 1) Do students feel like the activity is helpful in improving their writing skills? 2) Do formative/summative tasks show a change in student performance? 3) Does staff feedback show a change in performance? If the answer is yes on any of the questions, that suggests a useful improvement to my teaching practice on the module. Crucially I do not require both staff AND students to see improvement in this instance. If either staff see an improvement, or students feel the tasks are helpful for improving, it will be worth investigating further why perceptions differ between the two groups, and what can be done to better align them in future.
Dr Gwen Brekelmans is a Lecturer in Psychology, Advanced Research Methods in the School of Biological and Behavioural Sciences. She completed an undergraduate degree in English Literature and a research master’s degree in Linguistics at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands. She then moved to London in to do a PhD in Speech, Language, and Cognition at UCL, which she completed in 2019. She has previously taught on a variety of different degrees at UCL, including Psychology, Speech and Language Therapy, and Linguistics. Her research uses behavioural measures to explore language learning and speech perception across age groups, and her pedagogical scholarship interests lie with the teaching of academic writing, as well as showcasing diversity within psychology.
PGCAP is the Postgraduate Certificate Academic Practice, delivered by the Queen Mary Academy to staff teaching Queen Mary students.
The final module of PGCAP is Action (practitioner) Research. As part of this module, participants develop an Action Research Project Proposal. This is an excerpt from one such project proposal.