Students are given more freedom and opportunity to experiment with their own ideas and arguments. With emphasis on an open process environment where comments and tutor's remarks are recorded, students' abilities in structuring their argument and expressing reflective reasoning for their ideas are enhanced. Students could not only submit their work to a Student Pages section but also make changes using an Edit your page function. In the Social sciences, research capabilities manifest themselves in students' abilities to evaluate evidence and construct arguments, processes that rely on discussion and debate as the major forum for learning, in addition to opportunities to practise and apply theories and concepts. Tutorials and small group work are most commonly used.
Students prepare joint presentations or work through problems and case studies.
The approach is most beneficial in developing higher levels of abstraction and evaluation when they introduce to the students 'real world' issues, particularly through the lecturers' academic research and through the use of primary materials rather than text book sources. An assignment and assessment scheme was developed with the School of Law at Warwick based on making those working and study practices leading to high quality work more transparent to the students. This allows students to approach future assignments and finally dissertations with greater success and originality. The process, not accidentally, reflects the research process practised by experienced academics. The main failing of a student's approach is often a superficial interpretation of the course information and assignment meaning and depth.