Academic Skills Connections: Second year - steps to success

In order to succeed you will need to improve and apply your academic skills in order to perform effectively in your chosen field. You will be expected to evaluate different approaches to issues and problems.  Specifically you will need to continue your development in 3 main areas:-

1. Your learning and development - act on feedback in order to plan, monitor and review progress
2. Your research for your assignments - evaluate all relevant research and decide which are the most appropriate to use to support your assignments 
3. Your assignments: communicating effectively - demonstrate analytical and critical thinking and communicate your findings using appropriate academic language, style and format.

Act on feedback in order to plan, monitor and review progress

In order to improve your academic work you need to be honest with yourself, give yourself time to reflect: what has worked well for you in the past? What aspects of your work needs improving?  Think carefully about any actions you can take which will increase the chances of success.  These may be improving your time management, or looking at the feedback you got from previous assessed work.

Once you have reflected have a look at our resources - they may give you ideas, hints and tips - and then make an action plan. Be specific. What will you do differently to achieve different result?

Have a look at the resources, and good luck for your future study. 

Evaluate all relevant research and decide which are the most appropriate to use to support your assignments 

​Online databases contain high quality academic sources of information. This includes eJournals, articles and other useful resources. In your second year and beyond, using databases will be essential in almost all areas of study. Many online databases are subject specific  E.g. Business Source Complete (for Business related information) or CINAHL (for Health resources). An annotated demonstration of how to access our electronic resources is below.

Demonstrate analytical and critical thinking and communicate your findings using appropriate academic language, style and format.

Academic assessment is about communication: it could be written or oral - but it will be about communication and how well you achieve this. In this section there are resources which provide hints and tips on how to improve written and oral communication. 

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