Constructing an academic skills toolkit for embedding academic practices

This case study explores the successes and challenges experienced while creating the Academic Skills Toolkit 1 for use by academic staff at London South Bank University (LSBU). Based on similar initiatives at Queen Mary University of London (McConlogue, Mitchell and Peake, 2012), the University of Derby (2021) and the University of Huddersfield (Hill and Tinker, 2013), LSBU’s toolkit is a database of formative academic skills activities which are available for academic staff to adapt and deliver during lectures and seminars. The case study opens by explaining LSBU’s institutional context, including our Curriculum Framework, and the Centre for Research Informed Teaching’s (CRIT) role in supporting various features: employability, embedded learning development, pedagogy, inclusivity and assessment. The case study also discusses LSBU’s student profile, namely that we have a large proportion of students from non-traditional academic backgrounds. As such, the toolkit’s activities have been designed to enhance students’ criticality, analysis and confidence in their academic writing in a more general sense. The toolkit is freely available to the public on the internet. The link for this will be given to staff at other institutions at networking events. For the purposes of our institution our team can advise on its implementation by discussing ways to tailor activities to a given session with individual academics. The toolkit has five key areas: critical thinking development, quantitative analysis development, reading development, reflective development and writing development. The case study describes the elements within the toolkit and explains how it was developed, tested and revised to enhance its usability. It discusses the difficulties faced with building the toolkit within LSBU’s existing IT framework and outlines how we ultimately succeeded in generating a comprehensive database of tasks to support student learning.


Introduction
Over the past two decades, many higher education (HE) institutions have experienced an increase in numbers of non-traditional students, yet scholars have suggested that traditional teaching and assessment methods continue to be implemented without considering the changes in the student body (Wingate, 2006;Wingate 2007;Bailey, 2010;Leese, 2010;Kaur, Norman and Nordin, 2017). Non-traditional is an umbrella term that refers to students who come from a family background that does not include experience in HE as well as students with identifiers from a lower social class or who are categorised as minority groups (Chao, Laing and Robinson, 2005;Elmes, 2015;Mowat, 2015). These groups have complex characteristics which overlap with marginalised groups (Mowat, 2015) such as students with disabilities and students who face any form of social exclusion. It includes care givers and care leavers, although statistics show they represent a small percentage of the student body, and the amount is thought to be higher than this in reality (Office for Students, 2021). Furthermore, there has been scrutiny on government's accountability in regard to inclusive practice for learners with disabilities (Shaw, 2021).
Within this paper, we are unable to discuss each characteristic and the challenges they face as it is a multifaceted issue and, for this reason, we will discuss non-traditional students in general terms, taking different minority groups into consideration within our discussions. Thomas, Khanom, Adelaja, Mehbali  Previously, non-traditional students were often viewed as 'lacking' and HE institutions employed a deficit model (Wingate, 2006) of instruction (Wilkins and Burke, 2015).
Consequently, academic practices were often viewed by core teaching staff as something that should be taught separate to the programme itself (Bailey, 2010 (Vygotsky, 1978;Wingate, Andon and Cogo, 2011). The development of the toolkit was borne out of the frustration of repetitive requests from academic staff and students' study skills support. In 2015, a two-year project where the learning development team piloted embedded learning development led to increased first attempt pass rates.

The rationale behind the construction and development
The toolkit is a resource built by learning developers to support academic staff in developing students' academic practices, such as academic writing, reading and critical thinking, as well as quantitative analysis and reflective writing. It includes a range of formative activities that can be used in appropriate settings such as lectures and seminars. The toolkit contains multiple resources and activities with instructions and guidance for academics to teach independently to their students. Each activity has been designed to be taught as part of a module at various stages. The toolkit is underpinned by concepts of teaching and learning that are research-informed and is guided by pedagogical themes and development areas that overlap with the literature (Wingate 2006;Wingate, 2007;Bailey, 2010;Ashton-Hay and Doncaster, 2021) and is consistent with academic skills in HE. Wingate (2006) presents a dichotomy where generic skills training is referred to as a 'bolt-on' approach and embedded practice, known as a 'built-in' approach (favoured by Wingate), is content focused.
The built-in model develops learning within the subject and discipline and employs a longterm holistic approach (Boud and Falchikov, 2006;Wingate, 2006). Discipline specific discourse is used to support students to enculturate within their discipline in line with institutional principles and, therefore, assists students' academic socialisation (Lea and Street, 2006;Street, 2009).
Embedding learning development is a key priority for learning developers in the Centre for Research Informed Teaching (CRIT) and over the last five years the team has been able to evidence our impact across the seven schools in the university (Thomas and Mehbali, 2017). As a result of our success working with targeted low performing modules that had pass rates of <60% there was an impact in a number of schools: Sports Science went from 43% to 72%, Built Environment from 56% to 90%, Health and Social Care from 30% to 90%. This supported the team to pursue scaling up our embedded support which has led to the construction of the toolkit. The principle of the toolkit is to work as a practical guide for academic staff in teaching students academic practices in which reading, writing and critical thinking are central. Our research informed toolkit is based on learning developers' experiences of activities that have worked well in previous sessions that we have individually delivered and co-taught.
In UK HE institutions there are several challenges that our students face. For instance, they often have difficulty in building analysis which results in opinionated or descriptive writing (Guba and Lincoln, 1994;Hendry, Armstrong and Bromberger, 2012;Hendry, 2016 and Tang's (2007) concept of constructive alignment are meaning-making and learner constructed knowledge with learning that is linked closely to the programme outcomes and assessment criteria (Kinesh and Knight, 2013). For this reason, many of the activities in the toolkit require the academic to refer to the assessment criteria when teaching the various academic skills.
The toolkit encompasses some aspects of data analysis in the form of quantitative research methods to identify any pattern, association or relationship between datasets or the comparison of samples. Statistics allow us to perform hypothesis testing, ultimately leading to the acceptance or rejection of the assertion or research question posed at the start. The ability to process, manage and draw tangible significance from a dataset is becoming increasingly important for any industry or business. Given the rapid growth of the competitive global economy, the UK needs to meet the increasing demand for people equipped with valuable quantitative skills. Bean's (2016) report on UK economic statistics highlighted the need for the Office for National Statistics to increase its analytical capability.
Universities play an essential part in the data agenda and a key role in overcoming its challenges (Schulz, 2008 The authors performed thorough analysis of the curriculum development for quantitative skills underpinned by discipline-specific research and general theories of curriculum design. The study revealed wavering levels of embedding quantitative skills on the various programmes, showing there is room for improvement across the different years to support students better. In particular, the ability to support students transferring their maths skills for their discipline needed attention. It was highlighted that a hybrid model which seeks opportunities to embed and scaffold students' quantitative skills over the programme is valuable to enhance support. Thus, it is essential to review quantitative skills provision, considering the numerous skills that graduates will need to succeed in a range of industries. It is vital to consider embedding quantitative skills in HE. Harris (2011Harris ( , 2016  be demanding, yet also highly rewarding owing to its role in preparing students for employment. Moreover, a report by the Royal Geography Society (2013) demonstrated the importance of student interest and engagement in data and its need to encourage this from school into university. Data literacy is crucial to the outlook of competitive business in all disciplines; having these skills cultivated at university will make students more employable.

The journey of the 'Toolkit Club'
Our journey to develop the toolkit started with numerous requests from the seven academic schools across LSBU. Through discussions, the LD team noticed that we were receiving multiple identical requests, from essay writing and critical thinking through to technical lab reports and drugs calculations. As additional requests came in, with the team already co-teaching, co-creating curricula and delivering embedded sessions across the university, we were able to categorise the requests and began to record the types of sessions that were most requested (see Appendix 1). This led to a small pilot project to develop a range of class-based formative activities for our academic colleagues. As dedicated time was required to devise and develop our resources and to keep the project on track, we held weekly meetings referred to as the "Toolkit Club". Clark and Sousa (2018) discuss the balance between being creative and disciplined to complete tasks of this nature. During Toolkit Club sessions, we paired up to develop and adapt existing resources which had previously been used for teaching. All these resources were discussed, debated if necessary and reviewed accordingly. Once a range of activities had been created we realised that they needed to be tested and set about scheduling sessions with our departmental colleagues who would be our 'Critical Friends'. We also scheduled a series of CPD Workshops for our academic colleagues from the schools.

Critical Friends and CPD workshops
Our The CPD sessions delivered to our academic colleagues highlighted the activities that had to be redesigned or redeveloped and directed us to produce additional activities. Here are feedback comments from the session: • 'This is excellent and will support staff and students' (Director of Education and Student Experience, the Institute of Health and Social Care Team).
• 'Thank you, great resources' (Associate Professor, The School of Law and Social Sciences).
• 'This is a great initiativevery keen to see how we can create uptake' (PVC

Project planning and site design
Following analysis surrounding the need for the toolkit, general project management principles related to design for learning (Lynch and Roecker, 2007) were employed to construct a plan for implementation. Firstly, feedback from meetings held with colleagues from Digital Enhanced Learning (DEL) and ICT served to clarify design, accessibility, and portability objectives regarding what would be feasible for a project of this nature.
Secondly, although none of the team had undertaken any formal training in site design, there was an awareness of usability being a fundamental consideration when planning a website (Elkins and Pinder, 2017). Working within the constraints of the existing infrastructure, our intention overall was to avoid overuse of text by including visuals where appropriate to produce a distinctive and user-friendly interface for the project.  (Vygotsky, 1978) so students can link their prior learning and skills with the increased expectation.

Projects and Dissertations Supervisor Resources originally designed a standalone Moodle
Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) site, further extending the toolkit offering. The toolkit is designed to be accessible on all platforms and devices. Each toolkit activity has a summary sheet in the form of a Microsoft Word file documenting instructions on how to use the resource (see Image 2 as an example). Microsoft Word was chosen as the file format for the summary sheet owing to its proliferation, familiarity, and ease of editing.
Associated teaching resources are stored with their activities in folders on OneDrive. Image 2. Screenshot of the summary sheet from a Literature Reviews activity (Setting through to Outcome). Thomas, Khanom, Adelaja, Mehbali and Lambe Constructing an Academic Skills Toolkit for embedding academic practices Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, Issue 24: September 2022 10 Image 3. Screenshot of the summary sheet from a Literature Reviews activity (Pre-task preparation and Steps).

Challenges regarding generic resources and access
The influence of discipline in shaping teaching and learning content cannot be underestimated (Stark, 2000;Young, 2010). The toolkit consists of generic activities and resources that can be adapted by academics to make them discipline specific and link with respective modules. The main challenge was to avoid ambiguity and jargon so that the toolkit activities were coherent and complete to a point so academics did not need to spend excessive time planning the implementation of these. For this reason, we regularly assist course teams to contextualise content for their specific discipline and assessment. Feedback generated from team teaching and collaboration is utilised to differentiate toolkit resources for multidisciplinary use.
Additionally, a growing number of educational projects of a similar nature to the toolkit are freely available, meaning that they are accessible to those both internal and external to an institution (Beetham and Sharpe, 2013

Conclusion
Construction of the Academic Skills Toolkit has not come about without its challenges.
However, the success of the project is testament to our advocacy for high quality, research-informed practice that enabled us to develop an inclusive multidisciplinary teaching and learning resource for all levels. Currently, use of the Toolkit's precise activities is supporting academics to build knowledge and confidence across modules and courses, resulting in an improved student experience.
The toolkit is freely available on the LSBU website so that all can benefit from our collegiate approach to learning, teaching and assessment. Collegiality is often central to the success of projects of this nature, whether it be through collaboration with members of our team when constructing activities (Toolkit Club), working with departmental colleagues during "Critical Friends" sessions or whilst utilising activities team teaching in a classroom setting. External to LSBU, we presented the challenges and success of the Toolkit at ALDinHE symposia at their annual conference in April 2021 to support benchmarking and peer reviewing. This has allowed us to develop the toolkit further, so it is more comprehensive and easily adaptable for academics and module team members. Moving forward, we will continue to assess the toolkit to monitor its effectiveness. Learning developers at the LSBU are continuing to work with their respective schools to pilot the activities and ensure that academics feel supported to independently take an embedded approach to academic skills on their modules. We are working on several initiatives with a programme level approach which will equate to forthcoming research. In the meantime, we will continue to collate feedback from different perspectives to maintain critical rigour. in higher education to enhance their writing and academic skills. He has also worked extensively with academic staff on developing teaching quality and curricula across the university. He is particularly interested in peer-assisted learning (PAL), learning technologies and learning and teaching theory and practice.