Learning Skills

Learning Skills

How We Support Teaching and Learning

Our Mission Statement

Our mission is for all CSU students to be aware of and have access to a professional team that provides a quality learning skills service to empower our students to achieve their learning goals in a rapidly changing university environment.

Introduction

Learning Skills staff are located on each of the university’s Australian campuses. In addition to general learning skills advisers (LSAs), our staffing complement includes specialists in maths and statistics, English language experts, and staff whose particular responsibility it is to work with Indigenous students.

The role of the Learning Skills Adviser is, in general, to provide academic skills development and support to students of the university, with a focus on students in their first year of study. For most of the LSAs, this involves helping students to acquire and enhance the skills in academic language and leraning necessary for them to successfully complete their university studies. The work of maths advisers is most often orientated around the mathematical and statistical competencies that are necessary for courses as diverse as nursing, agriculture, radiography, management, and psychology.  In all cases, advisers strive to develop the students as independent learners.

Integrated support

In the past, Learning Skills staff have tended to work with students individually. This has been through  face-to-face appointments with students; and through mail, facsimile, phone, or email contacts with distance education students.  Gradually, the staff have developed a repertoire of “generic” workshops that have been offered on campuses to augment the work done with individual students.

However, in more recent years, Learning Skills units within universities across Australia have begun to replace “individual” models of working with students with alternative approaches that attempt to embed the development of fundamental academic literacy and learning skills into the courses in which students are enrolled. In other words, the move has been away from an individual and generic approach towards a closer involvement with the schools and faculties of the various universities.

There are several reasons for this development:

Our preferred approach

As a consequence of the above, Learning Skills now prefers a collaborative model; i.e. working with teaching staff with a view to embedding the development of discipline-specific academic language and literacy skills into the curricula. This involves the following elements:

Interestingly, when the essentials of academic literacy are taught to students in this way, it is not uncommon for teaching staff to comment that  the process has helped them to better understand the distinctive patterns of the genres in which they write in their discipline, which they’ve previously learned and understood intuitively, rather than systematically.

Our approach, then, has shifted from one that in the past tended to service the needs of individual students, to one in which students are serviced through our developing collaborative relationships with Schools.

Additional support

Whilst Learning Skills is moving inexorably towards an embedded approach to our work, we understand that our role is to support all enrolled students, and that we must therefore have a variety of ways of contacting them and meeting their learning needs.  Consequently, alongside our preferred approach, we also maintain a range of other means of supporting students, including the following:

Underlying many of these programmes is the belief that if students are to be assessed on something, then it is reasonable for them to be taught how to do it. These days, the expectation is that students will be able to write competently in a much wider range of literary genres (including essays, reports, annotated bibliographies, literature reviews) than was the case in the past. In contrast, some readers of this paper will recall that as undergraduates competence in writing in essay form was for them sufficient to achieve quite adequate grades.
Learning Skills staff are only too happy to talk with academic staff about ways in which our support of the schools and their students could be strengthened and enhanced.

LSA support for students

Learning Skills Advisers may work with all CSU students. We are, however, unable to provide services to students enrolled through partner institutions.

Full research students should contact the Centre for Research and Graduate Training for academic language and learning support.

What we don't cover

Learning Skills Advisers do not deal with the academic content of your subject. Rather, they assist students to develop the generic academic skills required in your discipline.

Student Awareness

It will be helpful if you are aware of the services we offer directly to students so that you may refer to them when appropriate. Contact your campus learning skills adviser to negotiate effective referral procedures with you.

Privacy

The Learning Skills service is a pdf iconconfidential service.

Plagiarism strategy

Learning Skills have developed a comprehensive website for students on Avoiding Plagiarism. You are encouraged to direct your students to work their way through this site.

One of the features of the Avoiding Plagiarism site is the ability for students to advise that they have worked their way through the site. By directing students to the Summary section of the site, they can submit a short form that will be emailed to you indicating their understanding of plagiarism and the associated topics on site. This could form a non-assessable task in order to meet terms in your subject.

Learning skills advisers have also developed a workshop on Avoiding Plagiarism. It is recommended that students, in particular first year students, attend one of these workshops and if possible a referencing workshop as well. You can request these workshops to be presented to your students using our online form.

Improving our service

We welcome your ideas and feedback.