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 Skills for Learning workshops and tutorials on academic communication, maths and IT skills.
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. For more information, see our Frequently Asked Questions page.
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 an 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?
- Dissertation proposals
Discover how to write structured proposal for a dissertation.
- Executive summaries
Understand what an executive summary is for and how to write one for your report.
- Professional Skills theme
Learn how to work effectively in a group, improve your time management, and identify techniques for creative problem solving.
- Creativity and problem solving
Learn the importance of creativity and how to use various techniques to help you solve problems.
- Abstracts
Understand what abstracts are for and how to write one for your dissertation or report.
- Literature reviews
Learn what a literature review is and how to write one effectively.
Popular resources
- Models for structuring reflection
Learn about the models and theories that you can use to help structure your reflective work.
- Team theory
Learn about Belbin's team role theory, a number of other team development theories and assess the roles of members of your team.
- Time management
Analyse how you use your time, identify areas for improvement and learn how to prioritise academic work and other activities.
- "Quote, Unquote"
"Quote, Unquote" is an authoritative source on author-date or 'Harvard' referencing. It contains the details of how to reference many types of sources and also gives advice on how to cite sources in your work.
- Mathematical Operations
Understand the four main mathematical operations, powers and the sequence in which operations should be tackled in calculations.
- Dissertation IT kit
Learn how to use the appropriate tools in Microsoft Word to format your dissertation in a professional and efficient way.
