This document discusses integrating academic skills into university curriculums. It suggests shifting away from seeing weaknesses as individual learner deficiencies and instead recognizing opportunities within course content. Academic skills requirements should be identified for each course, including when those skills are needed. A gap analysis can determine what skills development is already built into the curriculum, what students require, and responsibilities. Academic skills can be integrated implicitly, explicitly, or extra-curricularly. The document recommends promoting skills through contextualizing them within subjects, reinforcing them in class discussions, highlighting them in assessments, portraying a positive attitude, and allowing student reflection.

1. Integrating Academic
Skills into the curriculum

2. Academic skills positioning –
A need for shift in thinking?
Individual
learner
deficiency
Opportunities
that exist
within the
curriculum

3. Identifying your AS requirements
Curriculum
What academic
skills are
needed?
When are
these
academic skills
most needed?

4. Identifying your AS requirements
Gap
analysis
Existing built-in
skills
development?
Student
requirements?
Responsibility? Timeliness?
Measures of
success?
Extra-curricular
signposting?

5. Implicit
Explicit
Curricular
(Built-in)
Co-curricular
(Part built-in)
Extra-curricular
(Bolt – on)
AS seamlessly
integrated and
developed in tandem
with on course
teaching and
learning.
AS needs identified
and delivered with the
support of PAD tutors
and built in to the
curriculum where
appropriate. (usually
around assignments)
Separate AS provision
(workshops, one to
ones)
Students identify their
own needs and self-
refer independently
AS explicitly
integrated in to the
curriculum and part
of the dialogue of
teaching and
learning. Frequent
reflection on skills in
sessions.
AS needs identified
with the support of
PAD tutors and
through dialogue with
students.
Students lacking AS
identified and referred
to PAD. (usually
identified through
assignments)

6. Promoting AS development in teaching
AS development can be fostered through:
 Contextualising AS within the subject area
 Reinforcing AS in the discourse
 Highlighting AS in the assessment process (criteria,
marking and feedback)
 Portraying a positive attitude toward AS development
 Providing students the opportunity for reflection