?Essay creating trips up students
Essay producing trips up students
Tuesday 26 April 2011 01.45 EDT
"When I came to jot down my initially assignment, I cried," says Daphne Elliston. "I just didn't know what I was doing."
Elliston graduated accompanied by a degree in health and social care from the Open University. Though she's hugely proud of her achievement, she says that on the early days she worked up to three hours a night for weeks on finish to construct an essay she was happy to post.
"At the beginning, the foremost difficult thing was just understanding the academic words," she says.
"Then putting my unique words into academic language was hard. And it was difficult to believe I was entitled to my possess opinion or to disagree with all these academics who'd done years of research."
Elliston started her degree after decades out on the education process, and with just a person NVQ qualification to her name.
She believes the gap in her education was to blame but, according to some academics, scores of in the recent crop of students gearing up to A-levels will really feel exactly the same when they start out university this autumn.
Margi Rawlinson, academic skills co-ordinator at Edge Hill University, says it is wrong to think that only so-called non-traditional students wrestle with producing essays.
"We have people with A-levels who are arriving poorly equipped for academic creating," she says.
"I think one particular from the issues at A-level is they're not being taught to research independently, and <with>essays] it's not just the crafting - that's only part of it."
At Worcester University, Helena Attlee, fellow on the Royal Literary Fund and writer in residence, agrees.
"It would seem to me there's a lack of interface among A-levels and degrees, so the thing that people are required to do to get very wonderful A-levels isn't equipping them to do what is required to get a degree."
Over the last 12 months, part of Attlee's role continues to be to offer one-to-one sessions with students to help them build the skills needed to finished a well-written assignment.
"The absolutely everyday thing is they have no clue that there's a recipe for an academic essay. That can make life considerably easier for you if somebody bothers to tell you," she says.
"Students can have no idea of your concept of making an argument so their essays are entirely descriptive. You know, 'and then this happens, and such-and- these types of an academic says this about it, and then this happens, and so-and-so says that'."
With the ability to think or be able to write analytically "there's no conclusion on the reading you'll be able to do," she says. "And, at that point, students start out to say they sense overwhelmed."
Kate Brooks, principal lecturer and student go through co-ordinator during the faculty of creative arts with the University in the West of England (UWE), has carried out research into students' expertise in the transition somewhere between school and university, and says that essay producing featured strongly in their comments.
"One issue was time management - do they start off producing weeks before or the night before?" she says.
Inside workshop sessions she runs, she tries to explain that, in fact, crafting really is a smallish element in establishing an essay.
"Students can have an idea that it's a linear thing - you do your reading, then you get a cup of tea and sit down to jot down. We try to get across that it's a way more cyclical technique; do some research, draft a bit, look over some a lot more, think, consider what you've written, redraft. I'll explain that it's like that for academics, too - after all, I don't just sit down a person working day and think, 'Right, I'll create a book!'"
Some universities are now actively addressing the problem in individual faculties or by making generic cross-subject courses delivered by their study skills departments. But some students resist the help on offer.
"The English department right here put with a compulsory module called 'Writing at degree level', but dropped it when you consider that the students rebelled," says Attlee. "They felt it was remedial and offensive and they wouldn't go."
Attlee's one-to-one sessions are voluntary and very popular. Having individual attention, she says, can make all the difference to someone who is embarrassed to say that they're failing to master a simple - though far from really easy - ability.
At Essex University, the head of philosophy, Professor Wayne Martin, is passionate about the voluntary module on essay crafting he's created for MA and first-year undergraduate students - and he needs to be, as a result of it sounds distinctly time-intensive and is simply not an official part of his job.
"Students do it seeing that they plan to. They're not assessed, but it's really hard deliver the results," he says.
"In philosophy, a particular ability that's needed, and which needs time to build up, is the representation of argument so you don't get tangled up in creating extended, ugly sentences. And then, some very smart students can create, however they get to university and they overreach themselves, by means of phrases like 'hegemonic dialectical superstructure'!"
Sessions are run with all the students together in the room, so there's an element of having to cope which includes a bit of gentle public ribbing at several of the a bit more desperate clangers. Generating an atmosphere of trust and constructive criticism is therefore essential to helping people sense safe and ensuring they desire to come back again.
Essays are due into Martin's inbox at midnight on Sundays. He is up the following morning within the crack of dawn reading them, so he can selects excerpts for that entire group to discuss and rewrite together.
As he points out, this variety of tuition doesn't appear to make economic feeling, in particular with universities beneath tremendous pressure to teach in way more efficient ways. But, he says, it is far more cost-effective than it sounds. "My strategy with that is definitely for universities to be offering a mixture of very high-efficiency lectures - <he>would mean with hundreds of students] - but then use that efficiency to offer this kind of intimate instruction."
But is it realistic to think that people's essay-writing skills can improve significantly if they've not by now been developed over years in a very school setting?
"Yes, incredibly. Also, the biggest improvement is generally with the earliest 5 weeks," he says.
Elliston is living proof. By absorbing and working through all the feedback from her OU tutors over the six years it took her to get her degree, her marks went up from 56% on her initially assignment to 84% in her last essay of her final calendar year.
"That feedback, plus the nice way it was given, was so important," she says. But she wishes she had been greater prepared with the shock of leaping into an academic environment.
"I think an accessibility course would have helped me, before I started, to ge t the skills that were being going to be expected of me."