A Handbook for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education Enhancing academic and Practice

104 ❘
Teaching, supervising, learning
Case study 2: Exploring student misconceptions
• ‘I can’t apply to . . . because they want critical thinking and commercial
awareness. In my course we don’t do that. It’s all research and projects.’
• ‘No one tells you about what businesses want before you apply to uni. My
degree just doesn’t have any use, unless you want to do research and that
needs a 2.1 or first. And research is all my tutor can talk about.’
Making the link between personal reflection and workplace application is easier for
students who encounter personal development planning (PDP) in their vacation or termtime
employment. Where students struggle to see the relevance of reflection, tutorial
activities that begin with interviews with people who use personal development planning
at work may be helpful (Kneale, 2007), as would asking students to read and reflect on
Cooper and Stevens (2006).
Giving students the opportunity to practise making personal evaluative statements,
before encountering them at work, is an employability skill in its own right. The lack of
confidence of both students and academics with personal development processes exists
partly because they are asked to articulate in an unfamiliar language information about
which they feel self-conscious (Case study 2). Introducing students from level 1 onward
to the discipline Employability Profiles and the Skills and Attributes Maps (Higher
Education Academy, 2006) has the potential to develop the confidence of both students
and staff in openly discussing these matters.
Finding the language
To make employability links clear to students, and to expand their employability
vocabulary, it is suggested that the skills and competency terms and synonyms employers
use should also be used in module descriptors and outcomes. If this seems to be
pandering to the employment agenda, it is worth remembering that these terms are
commonly used in research and academic job advertisements.
Critical thinking
Data analysis to find patterns and trends and draw conclusions is one aspect of critical
thinking. This involves taking complex information, breaking it down into subunits,
performing statistical and other data analyses, and then reflecting on the results. The
keywords to describe these processes might include reasoning, logical thinking,
integrating, developing insights, and finding relationships, all of which could replace the
ubiquitous ‘research skills’ in a module or session descriptor.