Students Need a Good Study Skills Toolkit

One of my students was intriguing, she had progressed from level 1 to level 3, English was her first language, however the work she was submitting was weird. It read like a post graduate essay but the writing was impenetrable.

I checked for plagiarism, many searches later I found nothing. So, I did what I probably should have done to start off with and asked her, then watched as she worked on coursework. I found that she was using the synonym tool on the computer. By changing random words in text, she had cut and pasted, she had translated it into gobbledegook.

Why did she do this, a fundamentally honest student who wanted to go to university and study psychology, why would she cheat?

Obviously, she didn’t think it was cheating or plagiarising, it was probably something shown to her in the past which she’d taken to another level.

This students had never been given any study skills

She had come to college with grades E and lower at GCSE, had started at level 1 at college, and I think it demonstrated resilience and determination that she had got to a level 3 course. Sadly she had been passed off with substandard skills.

Habits learned in school will take time to change, and students need to have confidence in their own abilities. I genuinely believe that if students are given a properly thought out set of skills they will be able to study without resorting to nefarious practices such as plagiarism.

Teaching the skills of rewording, precis and reading to understand, will take time, but this time will be recouped when your students are assured and write with confidence. Think of the time saved when you don't need to correct the same mistake in each piece of work.

Success

One of the best bits of feedback I've heard from a student is that they were able miss a few lectures at the start of their course that were about referencing and citing within the text. I was really pleased to know that my students went away knowing how to reference quite often better than the A level students. I used to make sure that students knew the advantages that they would have when they started University or further study if they got to grips with referencing whilst at college.

I'm pretty sure that that student spent her time in the pub instead of going to the lectures about referencing; I’m not sure whether to be pleased about enabling this or not.

Take time to understand your students, you are powerful as a teacher, inspiring a love of learning, or halting a young person's education there and then. Appreciate your students, they are quite lovely when you do get to know them.