Knowledge or Skills — The Way to a Meaningful Degree? An Investigation Into The Importance of Key Skills Within an Undergraduate Degree and The Effect This Has On Student Success

Tutorials for Enhancing Skills Development in First Year Students Taking Biological Sciences

“…Students felt that they had developed intellectual curiosity (GA2) and attained transferable skills (GA6) and were aware of this acquisition both part-way through and at the end of the course. It seems likely that such students, and their tutors, recognise that these key skills are likely to correlate with their overall academic performance (Carroll & Feltham 2007). Since first-year students arrive at university with a wide range of skills (Jones 2011), a potential benefit of the tutorial course is to ensure that all students are similarly academically-prepared for future courses.…”

Remediation theory and practice : transforming at-risk medical students

“…There is also a dearth of literature on the components of effective remediation. Several authors suggest that successful support programmes should focus on both 'skills development' and 'content boosting' (Saks & Karl 2004;Carroll & Feltham 2007;. Hauer et al (2009b) recommend inclusion of diagnosis of problems, deliberate practice, feedback, and reflection, while favour a multimodal approach that addresses denial and involves authentic organized group activities.…”

“…There seems to be agreement between the education literature and our own experience on the reasons for students failing at medical school. These include over-reliance on passive learning Burns, 2006), insufficient background and content knowledge , weakness in literacy, numeracy, study skills, test-taking strategies, and critical thinking, (Pelley, 2002;Winston and Houghton, 2006;Garrett et al, 2007) and a general lack of the self-regulatory and metacognitive skills that are correlated with academic success Cao and Nietfield, 2007;Carroll and Feltham, 2007).…”

“…The recurrent themes are: self-regulation, metacognition and reflection; discourse and making reasoning explicit; active learning; giving and receiving feedback; focus on relevance to basic science course content; care with language and accuracy of thinking; and attention to affect and motivation. These skills can only be learned and demonstrated by doing, so the programme combines the development of skills with their application to relevant content Carroll and Feltham, 2007). What follows is an attempt, in broad terms, to describe how we address these issues.…”

“…A separate one-year intervention for 16 students, with weekly tutorials focusing on academic concepts and skills development reports improved performance of at-risk students . Non-academic interventions typically fail to improve outcomes , and there seems to be a broad consensus that successful support programmes should focus on both skills development and content boosting (Saks and Karl, 2004;Carroll and Feltham, 2007). However, several of these studies recommend further investigation into whether these programmes influence academic success, and how specific components help at-risk medical students (Burch et al, 2007;Saks and Karl, 2004).…”