I've just estimated that as a nursing lecturer I must have supported approximately 6000 students on an individual basis in writing one of their essays for submission as part of an undergraduate or postgraduate degree. Procedures vary at different universities and have changed over time, but the standard way that personal tutor support is structured for students is to allocate about 40 minutes of individual tutorial time with a lecturer for each formal assignment. This may be face to face, in small groups or online. From this experience I developed a simple tutorial structure that, if the student followed it, gave them an almost 100% potential for a successful assignment grade. The tutorial time is split into two 20-minute sessions. Session one is to review the student's 200-word bullet point plan and the second tutorial, about 6 weeks later, is to review 300 words of a sample page of what they considered to be their finished written standard. The structure of the plan will be considered in this article and the 300-word sample writing will be considered in the next article on demonstrating comparative analysis.
The rationale for structuring tutorials in this way is that, if the assignment is structured in a way that covers the question set and written in a way that demonstrates discussion, analysis and application, then the assignment will have covered the criteria required to pass. Therefore provided the student prepares for the tutorials as identified, listens to and acts on the feedback given, then these two 20-minute tutorials will help them plan and write a successful assignment.
Constructing a 200-word bullet point plan means that you need to think about and deconstruct the assignment question into about six sections, identify some key literature for each section and then allocate approximate wordage to each section. Consider the sample question I have been using in some of the previous articles in this series: ‘Discuss the importance of a holistic assessment of a newly diagnosed diabetic teenage boy admitted to a medical ward for assessment and insulin management’.
The sort of plan for a 3000-word assignment that I would expect a student to develop would be:
Prior to the tutorial I would have shown the student a sample plan for a different question, indicating the sort of detail that I expected them to produce. Focusing the student's attention in this way avoids them turning up having given no thought to the assignment or conversely having wasted many hours writing pages of poor or unstructured work. The production of this type of plan ‘forces’ the student to deconstruct the question, identify key points and undertake a partial literature review and think through the importance of each section. It helps them focus on the ‘big picture’ and also helps them to avoid getting sidetracked onto what might be a less relevant area.
Once presented with this summary plan then the lecturer can quickly review it, identify any areas that the student might have missed, discuss or reinforce any important areas relating to specific sections, discuss the word count given to each section and generally point out any major omissions or errors. If the student comes prepared then this part of the tutorial takes about 10 minutes. The remaining time can be used to explore with the student any worries or weaknesses they have relating to writing specific sections of the assignment. The tutorial then concludes with setting a date for the final tutorial and stating that the student needs to bring to that meeting one page from the body of their assignment, written to a standard suitable for final submission. This will allow the lecturer to comment on and give feedback relating to depth of discussion, comparative analysis and application—which will be the subject of the next article in this series on academic writing.