September 2009 — Volume 3, Issue 5

Novel approach to academic literacy

Making the transition to university study can be a big adjustment for students, particularly those who find themselves in a new country and in an unfamiliar learning environment. Not only are they often having to adapt to new social and learning cultures, they are also learning to navigate their way through a raft of academic expectations that will be critical to their success.

To help students make that transition and to understand core academic skills and principles Victoria University embarked on a multimedia pilot project in 2006 to develop resources around the themes of academic literacy and academic honesty. An $80,000 ALTC grant in 2008 enabled the project participants to build on this work to create a new suite of resources which were launched in August this year.

In collaboration with the Chinese University of Finance and Economics in Beijing, the VU team initially set out to address issues relating to academic literacy and plagiarism for Chinese students through culturally-specific messages and examples. However, the resources, particularly the videos and graphic novel, have application for all students.

Research for the ALTC project, Investigating the efficacy of culturally specific academic literacy and academic honesty resources for Chinese students, began in 2008 with focus groups comprising students and staff at the Chinese University of Finance and Economics and international students at VU. This was followed by conferences and workshops this year to demonstrate and evaluate a range of multimedia resources
created for the project.

Project leader and senior lecturer in Hospitality, Tourism and Marketing at VU, Paul Whitelaw, worked with learning support services lecturer and project partner, Fiona Henderson, and film-maker/multimedia expert Cody McCormack to transform concepts and scripts into videos. Penny Jose managed the website and Christine Mountford organised the workshop where the prototypes were rolled out to colleagues from around
Australia earlier this year. The VU team collaborated with Associate Professor Li Defeng, Gao Cuiming, Shi Wenjie and Li Qinxi at CUFE.

“We set out to develop a set of resources that treated this from a positive, pro-active perspective rather than
an onerous, text-based, punitive approach to plagiarism,” Mr Whitelaw said. “Plagiarism is a huge problem because of the different cultural and educational backgrounds of many of our students. But rather than adopt a typical text-based approach we sought to use audio and video and novel story telling as a means to convey these very important principles.”

A 25-minute video, The Road to Academic Literacy, comprises four key themes – academic literacy, critical thinking, creativity and academic honesty. It uses students and a lecturer to play out various real life scenarios that students could encounter when they are studying, with interactive elements to reinforce the key concepts and messages.

It begins with the cultural adjustment confronting students when they start university and a message from the vicechancellor. Among the key messages are that there is no such thing as “overnight success”: despite the popular portrayal by the media of high-profile people such as J K Rowling being an “overnight success”, success usually only comes with hard work.

The critical thinking aspect of the video covers topics such as referencing, arguing a case, and supporting opinions and arguments with evidence. The creativity component talks about ideas, adapting them in assignments and gives real life examples of creators, such as film-makers, who have put their own “twist” on ideas to become successful. The video cites the different forms of academic dishonesty and how to avoid them, how to cite sources and how to be an independent thinker.

View the website at http://tls.vu.edu.au/altc