Providing Support and Guidance

Within an institution, study skills support may not be just the responsibility of the subject tutor, other than any subject-specific conventions and practices. Study skills support may be provided by an institution's library services (for example about referencing styles or finding information), by specialist support tutors (for example about writing in an academic English style or developing numeracy skills), or from reputable online sources (for example the UK's Open University Skills for OU Study (link) web pages or their OpenLearn platform that provides free study skills courses (link)).

Appropriate academic support is about enabling students to independently develop and produce their own individual responses to assignment tasks.

For portfolios and projects this may focus on:

students planning and preparation
students presentation and academic skills
students subject knowledge and skills

For work carried out under examination conditions this will be restricted to the regulations set by the examining body and supervised by the invigilator:

checking student identification
ensuring that only permitted paperwork is available
ensuring that only permitted equipment is used

Inappropriate support is about avoiding potential academic malpractice by ensuring that the work students produce is authentic and reflects their genuine ability. In general this will be:

do not allow anyone other than the student to design or produce any part of that students assessed work
do not directly provide students with information that will materially improve their work

and especially, but not exclusively, for examinations:

do not allow any person to contravene any conditions of the assessment
do not allow anyone to conspire to assist or prompt students
do not allow any breaches of examination security
do not permit the use of unauthorised materials

Ongoing clarification may be provided:

in class sessions by devoting a short period to reviewing and discussing progress as a group overview
in assignment workshops to review progress in greater detail, perhaps with peer support
by reviewing individual drafts to provide generic feedback on the sufficiency of evidence
by assessment literacy sessions designed to improve students skill in understanding and responding to assessment tasks

Further information and resources about higher education study can be found on the LearnHigher (link) website which contains a collection of shared and free resources.

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