TO EMBED OR NOT TO EMBED UNDERGRADUATE ACADEMIC WRITING SKILLS - THAT IS THE QUESTION: AN INTRADISCIPLINARY APPROACH

The challenge faced in most university undergraduate provision is how to nurture enhanced academic writing skills among first year cohorts, to the extent students can begin to positively impact their degree classification, through immediate high assessment performance, by the time they commence their second year of undergraduate academic study, . i.e. the year in which assessment results start to impact final degree classification in many universities. This challenge is all the more pressing given the restrictive funding arena within higher education (HE) and the correlation between HE funding and indicators including: degree classification and the related student employment destination data; national student satisfaction scores . e.g. National Student Survey (NSS); Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) in the UK; league tables (.e.g. THE). The overall profile of which effects University student intake numbers and so the cycle continues. Against this backdrop, this paper will examine the case for embedding academic writing skills within a first term, first year undergraduate module taken by 300 students in a UK University the university itself, a member of the Russell Group. It highlights the default position for most academic writing support, within HE, is to adopt a centralised specialist unit approach that serves a multitude of faculty and disciplines. The approach demonstrated here, rather, challenges that view and instead seeks to illustrate the benefits of not only embedding writing support in the pedagogical design of a first year undergraduate module, but to accelerate student engagement and their academic success, by providing a choice of assessment questions. The paper also advocates that such choice, reflects an intradisciplinary approach that mirrors, in part, the curriculum themes students will encounter during the remainder of their degree. As the module in question is also part of a common first year taken by students from four undergraduate degrees, this intradisciplinary approach, also succeeds in exposing students to academic disciplines and assessment questions, they would not otherwise have been motivated to engage with. As such, this paper also explores the benefits of providing variety in assessment design as an aid to motivating students in applying their best approach to writing and successful completion of the assessment task helping to give them part ownership of the task through the personal choice they make. The work of Matsouka and Mihail (2016) will be examined which plays a crucial role in accelerating students’ understanding of why academic writing is important to their career and future study prospects. Further, this paper also seeks to advance the work of Windgate, Andon and Congo (2011) as well as that of Mostert and Townsend (2018) by adding an intradisciplinary approach to the ongoing and multilayered academic writing support advocated by the authors. Evidence of improved first year undergraduate academic writing performance, as a result of this approach, will also be evidenced in this paper along with improved student satisfaction scores.