Demonstrating our value: Researching the impacts of embedded academic literacy
Presenters: Dr Mark Bassett and Dr Lucy Macnaught
Institution: Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand
Dr Mark Bassett is a Senior Lecturer and Learning Advisor at Auckland University of Technology. He teaches and researches academic literacy at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, with a focus on embedding academic literacy development and online resource creation across multiple disciplines.
Dr Lucy Macnaught is a Senior Lecturer in the role of Learning Advisor at Auckland University of Technology. She collaborates with faculty to teach academic literacy within coursework and research programs. Her research interests include: embedded approaches to academic literacy development, integrating and designing AI, classroom discourse analysis, and multimodal metalanguage. Her book, Writing with Students, was shortlisted for the 2025 M.A.K. Halliday Book Prize.
Embedding has been a core strand of learning developer/advisor work for decades, and many of us simply take it for granted that it is an ideal approach to academic literacy teaching. However, experience tells us that our institutions do not see it that way, if indeed they see it – and us – at all. In this talk, we consider what we have done and what we can do, as a profession and a distinctive field of research, to persuade institutions that embedding is a core element of the curriculum. We start by reporting on findings from our systematic literature review (Bassett & Macnaught, 2024a) about evidence used to justify embedded approaches to academic literacy development. Findings show that research designs often involved questionnaire, interview, and focus group data to generate insights about student and staff perceptions. Other types of impact, such as possible changes in academic performance or gradual developments in student writing were reported on far less. Descriptions of pedagogic practices were brief and not always related to claims about impact, and publishing targeted a variety of disciplines. These findings highlight the need for research teams with discipline knowledge and literacy knowledge so that evidence about the impacts of embedded approaches on academic performance are included, as well as complementary publications that detail the pedagogic practices contributing to change in academic performance. A recent scoping review – specific to developing research writing in graduate entry nursing programs (Macnaught et al., 2026) – also complements these findings by highlighting a range of claims about impact. However, like the broader systematic review, pedagogic description was minimal, and teaching appeared to be isolated within one course rather than distributed across a program. Both these reviews invite further discussion of how we design research about embedded practices and whose attention we are trying to get from researching and reporting on the value and impact of our work. Put another way, a central issue is that we do not only want to have conversations with each other but reach senior leaders who can approve and advocate for more systematic ways of embedding (Bassett & Macnaught, 2024b). We also share the design of two current research projects that are responses to the recommendations in these reviews. The first project examines a first-year Bachelor of Business core course with a typical cohort of 700 students. Here, we will focus on access to multiple data types and creating logical connections between them that can generate triangulated and substantiated claims. Data types include marked assessment work, cohort grade distributions, LMS usage, conversation histories with a bespoke AI chatbot, interviews, and questionnaires. The second project stems from the aforementioned scoping review. It involves a Master’s of Nursing Science program with a typical cohort of approximately 30 students. Here, we will discuss the choice of Design Based Research (McKenney & Reeves, 2018) which, in our case, includes the use of surveys to inform multiple iterations of teaching. We will also discuss the collection and analysis of texts for investigating possible changes in student writing, including conversation histories with customised AI chatbots (Macnaught, 2026). To conclude, we share the notion of ‘publication suites’ for disseminating research and then invite the audience to contribute ideas about their research design choices and experiences.
References
Bassett, M., & Macnaught, L. (2024a). Embedded approaches to academic literacy development: A systematic review of empirical research about impact. Teaching in Higher Education 30(5). 1065–1083. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2024.2354280. Bassett, M., & Macnaught, L. (2024b). We’ve been saying embedded is good for ages, so why isn’t it happening more? Retrieved from https://aldinhe.ac.uk/ Macnaught, L. (2026). Customising chatbots for writing development: Anticipating semiotic mediation with the theoretical architecture of systemic functional linguistics. Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 80, 101646. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2026.101646 Macnaught, L., Winnington, R., & Macdiarmid, R. (2026). Preparing graduate entry nursing students to successfully complete research projects: A scoping review. ESP Today, 14(1), 89–114. https://doi.org/10.18485/esptoday.2026.14.1.5 McKenney, S., & Reeves, T. (2018). Conducting Educational Design Research (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315105642