Что такое academic skills
5 academic skills to prepare your students for higher education
Studying abroad in an English-speaking country is a fantastic opportunity for your students to use their language skills in real-world situations and give their confidence a boost. But how can we help prepare them for success, so that they can really benefit from their experience abroad?
One way to do this is to develop their academic skills alongside their language skills.
Why are academic skills important?
Academic skills encourage students to become more efficient learners. They give students the confidence to participate fully in English-speaking courses and are invaluable outside of the classroom and after they graduate. These skills, which include critical thinking and note-taking, are also highly transferable, and therefore vital for success in any career.
Students are expected to have a number of these skills when they start in higher education. The Global Scale of English (GSE) Teacher Toolkit organizes them into five categories:
Developing academic skills in the classroom
Here are five ways to help you build the skills in each of those categories:
Many teachers ask their students to practice presentations in class and this is a great skill to have. However, it’s very easy to overlook the students who aren’t speaking. By asking these students to prepare follow-up questions for the speakers, you can transform this activity into an active listening task. After the presentation has finished, conduct a student-led Q&A session, and provide feedback to the speakers on how they can better deal with difficult questions.
Give your students extra motivation by offering a prize for the person that asks the most interesting question.
Being able to make inferences is a very important academic reading skill. It not only helps students understand the text, but also encourages students to ‘read between the lines’ and look for deeper meaning.
How, then, can you strengthen this skill in the classroom? First, try developing this skill without a text. You can use short videos or pictures, such as the New York Times’ ‘ What’s Going On in This Picture? ’—in which students can try to infer the meaning of the photo. Once students have practiced this several times, move on to short texts. Take the first paragraph of a short story for example, and have students make inferences about the character, the plot and other aspects of the story using evidence from the text. Provide them with the rest of the story (or a summary if it’s too long) to have them find out whether their guesses were correct or not.
How many of your students find it difficult to both listen and make notes at the same time when they are watching a video or lecture?
When having class discussions, how effective are your students’ arguments? Producing coherent arguments is a vital skill for learners in higher education, and one that you can practice in the classroom. Find a model, written argument from the opinion section of a newspaper and cut it up into sections for your learners. Have them reorganize the text, and once correct, analyze the different components that make it coherent. Once students have discussed these, have them write their own coherent arguments on a range of topics that interest them. Then have them recite these arguments to their peers, and provide feedback on how logical their arguments are.
In the context of further education, it’s not just enough to say what you think the idea of a text is – students need to be able to provide evidence from the text itself. During class reading activities, have students get into the habit of underlining or highlighting parts of the text that they think support their answers, and discuss them during the feedback session after the activity. Encourage them to not highlight large parts of text, but instead, give them a word limit. By reducing the amount of underlined words, learners need to read the content carefully to really identify the key words and phrases.
Resources to help develop your students’ academic skills
There are a number of resources that you can use to help prepare your students for university study.
GSE Teacher Toolkit
The GSE Teacher Toolkit provides teachers with access to GSE learning objectives (including those specific to academic skills) to help you plan lessons that are at the right level for your students, and will, therefore, help your learners develop their academic skills in a structured way.
By combining expert content with academic skill development, University Success supports learners to become autonomous learners and do well in academic courses taught in English.
Going on to further education is often a scary prospect for your students. You can make the transition as smooth as possible by helping them develop both the language and academic skills necessary for them to succeed in the next stage of their studies. Use these five tips and see your students grow in confidence!
What Are Some Examples of Academic Skills?
Whether you’re headed off to college or you’re a parent of a grade school student, you may have wondered what it takes to excel in school and whether you (or your student) have the tools you need to succeed. Understanding math, science and other core subjects is essential, but those subjects aren’t the only things you need to master to thrive as a student. Case in point: Albert Einstein was possibly the most important scientist of the 20th century, but his track record as a student wasn’t particularly impressive.
Of course, part of the reason Einstein sometimes struggled was that he didn’t usually like school and the teaching methods applied, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have made some improvements by applying the critical skills needed to do well academically. You may or may not be the next person to make a world-changing scientific discovery, but you can always focus on building up your academic skills to help improve your grades and your overall learning experience as a student.
Learn to Take Excellent Notes
Quality note-taking doesn’t involve simply writing down everything an instructor says during a lecture — word for word. It also doesn’t mean recording lectures on a smartphone and listening to them later. The goal of taking notes is to capture the main ideas and main points from a lecture so you can review them later when you have more time to really absorb the information. That means your notes need to make sense to you. Even better, if your note-taking abilities are really on-point, someone else could read your notes and understand the main points the instructor talked about in the lecture.
Photo Courtesy: Klaus Vedfelt/DigitalVision/Getty Images
Unfortunately, taking notes isn’t a one-size-fits-all type of skill set. Most people develop their own individualized system that works for them, and a system that works for one person might not work for another. For example, some people like to take notes in an outline form that features main idea headings with bullet points underneath them that provide more details. Others write their notes in paragraph form using a narrative style, although they typically leave out all the small words to save time.
A mind map serves as a useful note-taking tool for people who are visual learners. Tony Buzan developed the two-dimensional concept of mind mapping, which uses a visual layout of information that the human mind easily recognizes and remembers. Mind maps start with a large circle that represents the main idea or goal. Smaller circles labeled with main facts or ideas related to the topic are attached to the main circle, followed by additional circles containing information that expand on those facts and ideas. This process repeats for any points with additional information. In addition to using it for notes, the process works well for brainstorming new ideas and working through problems.
Practice Critical Thinking
The ability to think critically will help you succeed in your classes and in the world after you graduate. What does this mean exactly? When you practice critical thinking, you analyze an issue based on the information and facts given to you or information you determine for yourself. Critical thinkers are able to separate the facts of a situation from how they might feel about an issue or how they initially react to a situation. A very simple example of critical thinking would be making medical decisions based on analyzing the information and advice provided by physicians — and possibly even researching additional information on your own — instead of making these decisions based on fear and other emotions.
A key component of critical thinking is a willingness to dig deeper and to refuse to accept situations at face value without questioning them. If someone had told you as a child that the sky is green, for example, you could have just accepted it, or you could have used your critical thinking skills to question the statement by asking for evidence to prove the sky is green.
As you develop your critical thinking skills, it will become easier to formulate and organize arguments for assignments and easier to interpret the information presented to you in lectures and assignments. These skills will then move with you into the future as you work through problems and challenges in the workplace.
Master Time Management
As a student, you typically have a lot to juggle. You could have a paper due tomorrow in one class, a reading assignment to finish for another class by Wednesday and an exam scheduled for yet another class on Friday. While you might not consider time management an academic skill, it’s a vital skill to master if you want to achieve academic success by completing your work on time and preparing for projects and tests.
Learning how to manage your time wisely reduces the likelihood of waking up on a Sunday morning with far too many assignments to complete before the next day. Prioritization is a key component of time management, which means you have to determine up front which assignments are most important and what you need to work on first.
The University of Leeds recommends using a system that focuses on the elements of urgency and importance for prioritizing tasks. If a task is both urgent and important, do it right away. This task is your top priority. An example would be studying for a major test in two days that counts as a large percentage of your grade. Next, focus your attention on tasks that are urgent but less important. This might be an assignment that is due the next day but only counts as a small percentage of your grade.
Assignments that are important but not urgent can wait until later to do them but should still be completed. An example would be a major paper that is worth a lot of points but isn’t due for a few weeks. If a task is not urgent or important, then it would be your last priority. If you run out of time, these tasks could be skipped entirely with little or no penalty. This could be assignments that aren’t due until the end of the semester that either serve as extra credit or only count as a very small percentage of your grade.
Capitalize on Reading and Writing Skills
Reading is an important academic skill, no matter what subject you’re studying. You need to be able to read and comprehend text in pretty much every class you take, including math. When you’re learning to read, you practice decoding words, especially words you haven’t seen written down before. Reading and writing usually go hand-in-hand as skills. To write well, you use those decoding skills to develop an understanding of how words work together to form proper sentence structures. These skills will help you as you read and break down the text on the page.
As you continue in school, you will need to develop what is known as close reading skills. According to Harvard College Writing Center, when you perform a close reading of a text, you examine the words and sentences carefully, looking for details that stand out. You might also pause to ask or write down questions about what you’re reading. The next step is to interpret what you read using your critical thinking skills. Depending on the assignment, you may also have to write a response to the text you read.
What Are Academic Skills?
Join the Community
Academic skills are a collection of study habits, learning strategies, and time management tools that help students learn and absorb school lessons. For most students, learning is about much more than access to information. Teachers often include academic skills in their lessons in order for students to really master certain concepts. These skills not only benefit the students when it comes time to take tests, but can also help in the future: solid study skills are essential for college success, for instance, and learning to balance multiple demands at once is valuable to many different career paths.
Core Skill Areas
Education around the world tends to focus on five primary areas: language arts, including reading and writing; mathematics; science; history; and technological literacy. Academic skills go hand in hand with these core subjects, giving students the tools they need to deeply learn the key lessons of each discipline.
Importance to Early Schooling
Students are typically exposed to academic skills from a very early age, often without even realizing it. The practice of daily homework, for instance, helps elementary students learn how to manage their time. Reading and discussing a book chapter by chapter emphasizes the importance of breaking large assignments into smaller, more digestible chunks, and keeping a daily journal of thoughts or a lab notebook during a semester of chemistry reinforces the notion of note taking and self-review.
In most cases, academic skills are organizational in nature. Students must learn to organize their time, their notes, and their study habits in order to effectively progress through a class.
Research is also a major component. Effective research skills do not come naturally to most students, and must be honed and refined over time. Elementary research projects that center on current events or class field trips pave the way for more advanced high school projects, college research papers, and even graduate thesis work.
Computer Literacy as an Educational Cornerstone
Technology is playing an increasingly pivotal role in education, which makes learning how to work with computers an essential learning skill. Most major research databases are online, and the Internet also provides a wealth of information on most any topic imaginable. Students who learn how to navigate these sources, as well as how to sort reputable information from illegitimate sites, are the best prepared to succeed in a world that is ever more computer-centric.
Computer skills are often taught at the elementary level through exercises like WebQuests or Internet scavenger hunts. Older students may take research courses that focus on maximizing computer tools for academic purposes. More and more, assignments in all disciplines incorporate word processing, web posting, and Internet research in order to help emphasize these skills.
Impact on Test Scores
While class participation and daily assignments are important parts of academic learning, the bulk of a student’s grade is generally assessed based on test performance. Academic skills are particularly important when it comes to studying for exams. Simply mastering the material is not usually enough: students must also demonstrate that they can synthesize information, draw their own conclusions, and apply lessons learned to new scenarios. All of this requires some sort of academic skill set.
Doing well on exams is also important when it comes to life after school. Standardized tests are used throughout the world as a means of assessing students’ aptitude for college or university admissions. Graduate programs typically make use of entrance exams, too. Students who have learned how to study and concentrate for long periods of time are poised to score the best on these sorts of tests.
Perfecting Study Skills in College
For many students, the academic skills needed to get through high school are slightly different than those needed to conquer the challenges of university life. College offers students a lot of new freedoms, both personally and academically. In order to help students adjust to these changes, many universities sponsor Academic Resource Centers focused specifically on academic skill acquisition. These centers typically employ tutors and counselors who can help students come up with study plans, chart out time management schemes, and balance competing demands.
Real-Life Implications
Mastering good habits in the classroom can also have profound effects on life after graduation. Much of what it takes to succeed in school is also required to succeed on the job. Time management, personal discipline, and the ability to complete multiple tasks simultaneously are all keys to good work ethic, and are the building blocks of most required job skills.
How To Develop Academic Skills
Though there are an extremely broad array of academic skills that can help kids to perform well on tests, essays, and evaluations, all require a few core abilities. Generally, these are:
While the «hard skills» that result from these general abilities can be taught directly at any point in life, abilities become harder to change as time goes on. Still, each can be reinforced through exercises and sound practices.
Concentration
One of the most helpful and efficient ways to increase concentration is to practice it through yoga or meditation. While kids don’t naturally understand the value of these ancient arts, children as young as eight can use them to improve concentration.
Both standard yoga and meditation require practitioners to pay complete attention to the breath of the body. When their attention inevitably strays to other things, meditation simply asks them to return to their breath. Over time, kids may find that the attention they developed in a meditative state carries through to studying or doing other things.
Recall
Recall is the ability to remember the things you learn under pressure. This is especially important when kids find themselves under stress, as the human mind tends to forget more when highly stressed. To improve your recall, you should do your best to reduce your stress. Ways to do this include:
Persistence
Persistence is the ability to continue despite experiencing setbacks or disappointments. The academic world is full of difficulties and setbacks. The adult grant application process, for example, almost always yields many rejections before even a single success. In order to train persistence, students must see examples of mentors and role models experiencing the same hardships they do.
What Are Some Good Academic Skills
It isn’t possible to learn every single academic skill in a single study session. Good habits are developed over time and honed through practice. It can, however, help to know what specific skills successful students use. Here are some:
Academic Skills Examples
While there are too many useful skills to list here, most successful adults have used these at one time or another to learn difficult material:
Studying Effectively
It may sound obvious, but studying effectively is among the most important of all academic skills. The most efficient study strategies make use of one or more mnemonic devices. Though there are plenty of examples of such devices online, a simple one is to create an abbreviation. To remember the order of the north, east, south, and west cardinal directions, for example, kids are sometimes encouraged to remember the ridiculous abbreviation «never eat soggy waffles.»
When studying for material with clear right and wrong answers, flashcards can’t be beaten. Since flashcards require students to use recall, rather than deductive abilities, they powerfully strengthen memories of specific items that would otherwise be all too easy to forget.
Reading Actively
Though most students understand how to read, reading to absorb content can be much harder. One way to hack the brain to remember better is to highlight at least one key phrase per paragraph of reading material. This tells the mind that the material is important and that it shouldn’t simply be dismissed as filler.
To add extra power to a reading session, many prudent students write notes in the margin regarding any questions or misunderstandings they may have about the material. Others simply write out connections or ideas that come about.
Using Test-Taking Techniques
Taking tests effectively is an invaluable skill for students of any age, and multiple-choice tests are perfect for using special strategies. Crossing off unlikely answers, for example, can statistically improve students’ chances of guessing correctly without any additional research. Another technique is to abandon unclear items and search for the answer later in the test. There are innumerable other simple strategies, and each can ease test anxiety and improve grades.
Understanding Sources
The world of today is full of subpar information, and this makes sorting good references from bad ones all the more important. Unfortunately, students are often taught far too late how to find reputable academic articles online. Often, it isn’t until late college that young adults learn to scrutinize sample sizes, populations, and study design. The earlier kids learn about these scholarly nuances, the better.
Margo Upson
Margo has a varied academic background, which has involved everything from psychology and culinary arts to criminal justice and education. These wide-ranging interests make her an ideal PracticalAdultInsights writer, as she always enjoys becoming an expert on new and unfamiliar topics.
Margo has a varied academic background, which has involved everything from psychology and culinary arts to criminal justice and education. These wide-ranging interests make her an ideal PracticalAdultInsights writer, as she always enjoys becoming an expert on new and unfamiliar topics.
You might also Like
Recommended
Readers Also Love
Related Articles
Discussion Comments
I read an article recently that was talking about how the US has fallen behind in basic literacy and why this happened. It was really interesting, because it had the example of a school where the kids were doing really badly and the teachers just thought they were lazy.
But, when the kids were tested on basic skills, like even knowing how to use the word «although», they simply didn’t understand it. Turns out, like many schools, they had been trying to get the kids to be creative, telling them to write fiction, and expecting the academic English study skills to just form on their own.
Mutsy- I’ve heard of Kumon. Along with time management they also enforce a mastery of mathematical computation in the earlier levels.
This ensures that the student will be able to tackle algebra and develop a higher order of mathematical reasoning skills for subjects like calculus.
Kumon is a very forward thinking program and most of the students have advanced academic skills in reading and math.
I agree that time management along with in depth knowledge for math and reading allows most students to learn new material with relative ease.
I enrolled my daughter in the Kumon Math and Reading Center because she had difficulty with her time management and could not finish her tests in math.
At Kumon, all assignments are timed with a start and end time. This is done so the student is forced to focus on the material and not waste time.
After a while the student becomes accustomed to performing tests and general work assignments within a certain timeframe.
My daughter now finishes her assignments first in her class and gets straight A’s.
Kumon really teaches time management skills to students which helps them excel in other academic subjects.