This post is brought to you from Drs Mark Bassett and Lucy Macnaught at Te Wānanga Aronui o Tāmaki Makau Rau Auckland University of Technology in Aotearoa New Zealand. As many of us know from experience – and shared frustration – although embedded practices are efficient and effective, they are not well supported. It seems we need to do much more to convince leadership of our value. In this blog, Mark and Lucy discuss their recently published systematic literature review of empirical research into the impacts of embedded academic literacy development: https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2024.2354280.
An embedded approach
It often feels like we are at the mercy of the University Gods. We want those in leadership to see the value of what we do, but the distance between us feels vast. Even in the face of public concerns about the literacy knowledge of tertiary students – see this recent chastening example in the Australian media – it seems as though our attempts at communicating our value just don’t transcend.
As literacy specialists working in higher education, our goal is to prepare students for success with their discipline-specific assessments. We do this by teaching within the core curriculum, that is, bringing teaching to where students already are. This is called an embedded approach. It does not involve ad-hoc, bolted-on workshops with generic or superficial tips and tricks.
It’s a no brainer
With embedded literacy teaching, no assumption is made about who needs it. The starting point is one of equity: all students are taught about the discipline-specific ways of doing things. Students also do not have to spend additional time and energy doing extra tasks on top of their already high assessment loads. Instead, an embedded approach only asks students to learn about literacy that is intertwined with the assessments they already have to do.
For those of us working this way, including our vital collaborations with subject specialists, it’s a no brainer. So why is it not happening across all programs and not given priority when the money tree is shaken?
Choices about evidence
One issue is having evidence about what is ‘working’ and why. In our systematic review a striking feature of evidence used to support an embedded approach was how heavily weighted the evidence was towards student and staff perceptions:
Figure 2: Types of evidence used to show the impact of embedding in 20 studies (Bassett & Macnaught, 2024)
This is not wholly a bad thing – we do want to know how students and staff experience embedded AL, of course. Still, if we are going to make our case to the VC and others who must make bold decisions about priorities and resources, we might also want to throw in some other types of evidence to complement all of that rich information about how people feel. These probably ought to include changes in student performance as well, but that kind of triangulation of data types seems rare to date.
Designing research teams
Another related issue is about the design of research teams for investigating embedded approaches. This choice determines possible data types and the treatment of them. For example, if adding evidence about student performance is part of the research design, then research teams with subject specialists and literacy specialists can analyse gradual changes in student work and relate this back to what was taught. Depending on how intense and sustained literacy teaching is, gradual change may be a more realistic performance outcome to capture.
Through teaching together and forming research teams, subject and literacy specialists may be able to gain access to a range of data. We have choices about using different types of data for specific claims of impact, such as using teaching slides or recorded lectures to identify changes in teaching practices and using survey data for student perceptions about the teaching.
Claims about impact | Possible data types in embedded contexts |
Change in teaching practices | Assessment task instructions Teaching slides Lecture recordings Curriculum design Online content & specific elements therein |
Perceived value/critique of teaching and/or assessment design | Questionnaires Focus groups Interviews |
Gradual change in student performance | Student responses to summative and formative assessment tasks |
Need for and contribution of online resources to learning experiences | Online content usage stats Time on specific pages/elements within pages |
Iterative improvement of online teaching materials (through co-design) | User experience data (e.g. student feedback about online resources and design elements) |
Long-term partnerships
At Auckland University of Technology, we’ve felt very fortunate with our sustained research partnerships. In a past research project with the School of Education, we analysed interview data from lecturers in the School of Education about their experiences when we co-created but then gradually ‘handed’ over literacy teaching to them. (Yes, more perception data!)
Additionally, with the advantage of lecturer access to assessment task resubmission rates over several years, we were also able to make claims about the contribution of new and innovative literacy teaching to a reduction in the resubmission rates of assessments.
In a current project with the School of Nursing, we are focusing on the research writing thread across a program. We are interested in the ‘shelf-life’ of face to face teaching, that is, if some of the literacy teaching from the classroom flows into on-going conversations between students and their research supervisors. We also want to know the extent to which our complementary online resources may be used by students or used in the feedback that supervisors provide. For these lines of inquiry we have ethics approval to collect survey data from supervisors, conduct focus groups with students, access learning analytics from Canvas pages, and collect student writing samples of formative assessments prior to literacy teaching and then their subsequent drafts.
What’s that in the far distance? Could it be an end to the wait?
As well as waiting for embedding to be implemented at scale, we also seem to be waiting for some kind of shared definition among literacy specialists about what it actually is (e.g., is it hard or soft? see Murray, 2022) – this is definitely a problem. If we put ourselves in the moccasins of the decision makers, then it’s hard to invest in an idea that is ambiguous/vague and decide how it can be operationalised.
What we can do, as a collective, is conduct and publish the sorts collaborative research into embedding mentioned above and make sure we rigorously and transparently report on impact. By doing so, we’ll be strengthening the body of knowledge about embedded practices and moving closer to a shared and verifiable definition of what it is. This seems vital for bringing a swifter end to the long wait for it.
Our systematic review of the empirical research about the impacts of embedding (done so far), which you can read open access in Teaching Higher Education, makes it clear that we all have some work to do in bringing that wait to an end.
References
Bassett, M., & Macnaught, L. (2024). Embedded approaches to academic literacy development: a systematic review of empirical research about impact. Teaching in Higher Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2024.2354280
Cassidy, C. (2024, July 29). Australian universities accused of awarding degrees to students with no grasp of ‘basic’ English. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jul/30/australian-universities-accused-of-awarding-degrees-to-students-with-no-grasp-of-basic-english
Macnaught, L., Bassett, M., van der Ham, V., Milne, J., & Jenkin, C. (2024). Sustainable embedded academic literacy development: The gradual handover of literacy teaching. Teaching in Higher Education, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/13562517.2022.2048369
Murray, N. (2022). A model to support the equitable development of academic literacy in institutions of higher education. Journal of Further and Higher Education, 46(8), 1054–1065. https://doi.org/10.1080/0309877X.2022.2044019
Author Profiles
Dr Mark Bassett is a Senior Lecturer and Learning Advisor at Auckland University of Technology. He teaches academic literacy at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, with a focus on embedding literacy development in subject content and online resource creation. Mark is interested in researching the practices of learning advisors, academic literacy teaching, the effectiveness of online resources for student learning, and higher education pedagogy.
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, classroom discourse analysis, multimodal metalanguage, collaborative writing, and co-writing with GenAI.