Welcome to Skills for Learning
Skills for Learning is a collection of resources to support the learning and teaching of academic skills.
Developing your academic skills is an essential part of successful study at university and your future employability. Academic skills include the use of IT, numeracy, academic literacy, problem solving, critical thinking, working with others and research skills.
We also offer workshops and other types of support, please see the Get Help page.
Off-campus access: If you are accessing the site off-campus, you will be asked to log in using your user id and password from your student card.
Academic Skills Resources
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Academic Communication
Learn about writing essays, dissertations and reports; how to reference your sources correctly; what plagiarism is; how to make a mind map; how to read more effectively; and what is meant by critical thinking.
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Global Student
Learn about successful language learning; how to improve your cultural awareness; and how to cope with culture shock.
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IT
Learn about how to improve your academic IT skills; the meaning of technical terms in the IT glossary; and download IT self study booklets covering a range of topics, including Office 2010.
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Learning and Study
Learn about the difference between formative and summative assessment; different methods of assessment such as exams; organising your study spaces; how to become a confident student.
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Maths
Learn about how to improve your maths skills; how to calculate percentages; express proportions as ratios; use different types of charts; and test your maths skills.
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Professional Skills
Learn about why group work at University matters; effective teamworking and team development theory. Improve your time management skills; and consider different types of employment.
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Reflection
Learn about why reflection is important in academic study; different ways of reflecting on your experience, such as critical incident analysis; or writing a reflective journal; and different models for structuring reflection.
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Research
Learn about the research process; ethics and research; finding information; evaluating websites; and analysing and presenting data.
Resource collections
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International Students
A collection of our website resources that are especially useful to our international students while studying here.
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Postgraduate Students
A collection of our website resources that are especially useful to our postgraduate students while studying here.
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Graduate Attributes
A collection of our website resources to help you explore the three Graduate Attributes you will develop through your studies at Leeds Beckett University.
What's new?
- Becoming a confident and motivated student
Increase your self-confidence, motivate yourself, and learn how to give and receive constructive criticism.
- Executive summaries
Understand what an executive summary is for and how to write one for your report.
- Abstracts
Understand what abstracts are for and how to write one for your dissertation or report.
- Professional Skills theme
Learn how to work effectively in a group, improve your time management, and identify techniques for creative problem solving.
- Learning and Study theme
Find out about different methods of assessment, learn how to manage your studies independently and confidently.
- Dissertation proposals
Discover how to write structured proposal for a dissertation.
Popular resources
- Essay writing
Learn to analyse essay questions, to write your own questions and to plan, prepare and write essays using the appropriate style and presentation.
- Critical thinking
An introduction to critical thinking at University. Learn how to analyse arguments used in sources and how to improve your own arguments.
- The research process
Identify different types of research, the purposes of research, and the stages of a research project.
- The benefits of reflection
An introduction to reflection. Explains why it is useful to reflect and why you may be asked to do it while at University.
- Models for structuring reflection
Learn about the models and theories that you can use to help structure your reflective work.
- Harvard referencing
An introduction to referencing explaining why it is important to reference your work correctly and various terms that are used.
