Developing Academic Skills

Task one

Time management

Time management techniques are designed and used to help people stay more productive by making the best of their time and staying focused at the same time. This degree of focus allows people in the workplace and students at school to accomplish most of their tasks in the shortest time possible. Time management techniques help to beat procrastination, as this is the enemy of success in all sectors we venture in, either school, workplace, spending time with family, or recreational activities (Kirillov et al., 2015, pp.193-204). Through creating a habit of consistency and persistence, we can be winning the war against procrastination, which affects many students in the school setting, to the point of ending up stressed by the pressures from the school curriculum set up. This stress ends up piling up and affecting the student’s productivity or performance rate, leading to more severe mental health issues like anxieties and depression. Many colleges and universities have been experiencing cases of students committing suicide due to academic pressure and lack of best results or attaining the required grades, and time management are at the center of this problem (Bratterud et al., 2020, pp.498-502). Mismanagement of our time has been the main course of all the failures we have ever experienced. Time management techniques are skills that everyone should be well equipped to attain success; they include Eisenhower Matrix, Pomodoro Technique, and Eat your frog. Such techniques can help anyone beat procrastination in every task we get involved in, either at school, home, or the workplace.

Eisenhower Matrix

“I have two kinds of problems: the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.” Dwight D. Eisenhower. Dwight invented the Eisenhower Matrix to help people make decisions quickly when managing their time. Tasks distinction is made based on urgent or not urgent, and essential or not important.

Time table

“The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.” — Stephen Covey. As per Stephen, the key in creating time table and managing time is to create a good list that outlines the urgency and importance of the priorities in achieving your set goals.

Reflection

Reflection is essential in our daily lives as it helps us remember our past experiences and helps in correcting them as we learn from the incidents. The paper will use Gibbs’ reflective cycle to reflect back on how I was able to use my timetable and time management techniques like Eisenhower Matrix to complete my tasks and conquer procrastination through my module study. This time management was done considering the proper standards of practice in every task I was performing.

During the first two weeks of the beginning of the module, I was experiencing difficulties and anxieties about how I will be able to manage my time, yet I had so much on my schedule. Balance is a critical component in every aspect of life. But with that knowledge, I was experiencing difficulty creating a balance between study time, work commitments, recreational time, and family time. Work-life balance is crucial in the stability of our mental health, and losing that balance can be the critical factor that may lead to losing everything we have been fighting for in our lives.

Learning about time management and all its techniques made it easier for me to conquer these anxieties and perform even better than I had expected. The secret of everything is starting and planning, and that helped in balancing the study time and doing assignments which were at the top of the priority list. I also found time to visit my family and friends during the weekend, have a good time and refresh as I waited to start the week, and keep chasing my career goals. The weekend was also an excellent time to enjoy swimming, watching, and going on outings and dates. Eliminating the most time spent on social media and watching movies and series also was vital in helping me manage my time as this acted as the destruction that kept me far from my set goals.

According to Eisenhower Matrix, it is essential to distinguish your priorities according to urgent and not urgent, important and not important, to have a clear mind on which are the top priorities. This will help create a clear path on where to put much of your efforts to ensure the success and achievement of set goals.

Through time management, I have learned the skill of delaying gratification, which will help tackle the most difficult and important tasks early in the morning to avoid much stress during the day. This will also reduce the time used being busy while at the same time we are doing nothing and turning this time to my advantage and be more productive than before.

Task two

Resources

For any student to understand any module or course, they will need different vital resources that will help ensure effectiveness and efficiency during the study. Some of the vital resources that help me during the module study are academic workshops, study groups, academic mentors, and writing centers.

Academic workshops in the school are designed and set in the school to help students understand their classwork and any other activities in relation to their courses better. These workshops help deepen our academic skills through sharing within a group of five to ten students (Moles and Wishart, 2016, p.4). Listening is a critical skill in these workshops as you have the chance to hear other people’s experiences during the course time and how they managed to conquer anxieties and equip themselves with essential skills. When a problem is shared is halfway solved, and, in these workshops, people can open up about what is disturbing them.

Study groups have proved to be critical in students’ success since schooling history. The peer groups formed within our class helped solve problems, read, review study materials, and study for exams to improve our performances. Through study groups, we measure and evaluate our abilities before examination time. The sharing and asking of questions are vital in understanding the module very well; they can also help relieve the pressure from the coursework. Reduction of stress will help stabilize the student’s mental help as we keep performing better. When using study groups set up, it is easier to ask for assistance from our tutors as it happened with our group of five students.

The students who have already covered this module and our tutors were helpful mentors. They helped in coaching and mentoring me to become better in academic skills like writing and team management, which has proved to be critical in every aspect of my life. Time management helped me ensure all tasks and components of my daily life are well attended to and even get myself some free time, which is vital in ensuring proper balance in my life. Mentor has experience in different areas mor than us and, through the reflection of their experience, can be crucial in helping us learn and achieve even better results than before.

Writing centers in our residential area were vital in improving my academic and writing skills. We gain perfection in every area of our lives through practice, and sometimes we have to go the extra mile to achieve the success we want. The Editors, professional writers, and tutors offices located in the college’s residential areas proved to be vital in developing academic skills and other modules that will be vital in my high education learning and career.

Reflection

Academic skills are essential habits or talents in the intellectual pursuit of learning, report writing, research, referencing, and presentations. They include essential skills like communication, time management, analysis, planning, test-tasking, social, studying, and technical. Everyone should be well equipped with or create a better team with the required depth of the skills. Skill development is critical in every space of our lives, whether in academics or the workplace. Developing academic skills should be mandatory in all school courses as they will be the guideline of the students as they sail through their professional and career lives. By developing a suitable skill set, an individual can attain success in life. While pursuing employment in the marketplace, these skills are vital in getting any job someone dreams of.

Even some of these skills and terms were new to me was enough reason to raise my anxiety levels. I was having many difficulties settling and adapting in the class till I took a step forward to join study groups, academic workshops and look for mentors who helped conquer these fears and settle well as if I was a natural.

Through these different groups and workshops, I finally managed to settle and started improving my performance day after day. The process of professional development is a continuous process, and we cannot afford to be lazy at all. Development or researching skills has proved to open new doors I never thought existed before. Now I have better skills of conducting any form of researching need either in my academic life or in today’s market.

According to Pereira, referencing, summarizing, and researching skills are vital in attaining success in the academic journey (Pereira et al., 2017). Learning the different types of referencing like Harvard, APA and MLA have been vital in indicating the source of my work during reporting writing and other critical academic work. Summarizing is critical even when we prepare for our presentations as they are to be conducted in limited time and prepare for exams.

Now, these skills will help me improve my writing skills as I plan to venture into the writing of eBooks and Novels in the next few years to create a more diverse portfolio. I will also rectify some of the past mistakes in my academic and writing skills.

Task three

Book

“Academic Ethics” Patrick Keeney Patrick talks more about the ethics that should be well considered in university education.

The work tries to formulate the best way institutions can follow or adhere to the formal codes of ethics. The book aims to achieve academic integrity where everyone should work and the correct professional code of ethics. Academic integrity is based on fairness, respect, honesty, trust, courage, and responsible, which aims to respect everyone’s work while eliminating cases of plagiarism through well referencing the borrowed work. The author insists on how students should be prepared to transition from schoolwork to the community or outside schoolwork. The preparation requires students to know very well about the professional requirement when it comes to academic work matters (Barrow and Keeney, 2006). Ethics hold the communities we live in together by keeping everyone in check ensuring good morals, virtues, and norms. This ethics should be well reflected in the academic life to enable the student to have a smooth sail when it comes to matters of assignment submission, report writing, and also for those who want to venture more into the academic writing sector to publish, books, journals, eBooks and books.

The school system’s primary purpose is to help make their lives easier as they learn and educate themselves. These academic skills, in one way, should help in assisting students to transition easily to their professional and career life. In the new life of professionalism, the skills and ethics will help the students stay on the right side of the law and become responsible citizens.

Newspaper article

“Integrity in higher education marketing and misleading claims in the university prospectus” John Bradley.

The article is on an international journal talking about educational integrity.

The main idea is to bring sanity to the higher education level by focusing on bringing academic integrity to a field where people seem to have forgotten their way. The administrations have let cheating be the norm of the day, as per the 2013 report. The article highlights some of the cheating taking place in the places of higher learning. This contained a list of nine typologies; omission of facts and selection of data when reporting, use of misleading wording, misleading attributes, misleading association when it comes to features, misleading endorsements, claim-effect discrepancy, falsehoods, the well-crafted comparison, and lack of reference point during claims (Bradley, 2018, pp.1-18). The article investigates this list of typologies used to undermine integrity in these places of higher learning.

Institutions should put rules in place to guide students on which quality of work they are expected to submit to fighting the cheating which is taking place while the administrations and the government are watching. Students should be well guided as they join the areas of higher learning, making it easier to transition to professional life, which demands a lot of integrity compared to school life. Cheating should not be let take more roots in our educational system as the originality of ideas will be a word of the past. The job market is more demanding now for employees to be more creative and innovative, and there are no chances for cheating. Cheating is not allowed in the job market as one can spend many years in prison, so the school should instill the right culture in the lives of students who will be joining the job market very soon. Integrity and ethics should be helped with high standards in the lives of every person.

Task four

Plagiarism and academic integrity

Plagiarism contains the essential components which surround academic integrity. They work hand-in-hand in ensuring people adhere to set rules and ethics which govern the integrity surrounding any form of academic writing, whether with newspaper articles, books, eBooks, novels, journals, and any other writing or educational materials. Academic integrity is a rule of law or commitment where different parties live by specific values and ethics surrounding academic work. Plagiarism is put in place to detect any lack of intellectual integrity’s fundamental values, including honesty, trust, respect, courage, fairness, and responsibility (Morris, 2016, pp.1037-1053). These values form the fundamentals of academic integrity. Plagiarism is the aspect of academic writing which protects other people’s work from people who intend to take other people’s work without recognizing them (Helgesson and Eriksson, 2015, pp.91-101). Using other persons’ words, graphics or illustrations, facts, ideas, opinions, theories without acknowledging or giving credit for the efforts they put in researching is considered dishonesty and cheating.

Tools like Turnitin are used to ensure this academic integrity in the school and other sorts of life. The school system punishes students for copy-pasting other people’s work as this proves a lack of integrity and laziness, which is unacceptable in the school (Randall, 2016). If this has to be done, students have to do it the right way, using quotation marks and the correct referencing system to acknowledge that the work was borrowed from another person. Outside the school setting, people who are found with cases of plagiarizing other people’s work may end up fined in the court of law as they lack the moral integrity to be in the academic and writing sector. The government has been fighting against copying other people’s work, and people who get involved in those actions may end up risking the government from taking action on them. Claiming to ow other people’s original idea calls for measures as it violates all the integrity in the academic sector. Plagiarism should always be kept in check as it contains academic dishonesty, which contradicts all set integrity.

Referencing

Every work borrowed from someone must always be referenced and cited, whether summarized, paraphrased, or directly quoted. Paraphrasing is the form of writing where you integrate other people’s work by using your phrasing, world, and interpretation. While summarizing is done on people’s articles or work where you shorten their work to a few paragraphs which are well understood. Referencing is done in two main ways; in-text citation is down with the section and at the end of the sentences of the exact place the borrowed work is applied (Pears and Shields, 2019). Harvard referencing demands that you also indicate the pages where the borrowed work can be located. The other way is through referencing list, also known as the bibliography, which comprises all the sources used in the presented work. Below is a reference list indicating the reference format, examples, and in-text citations format.

Bibliography

Barrow, R. and Keeney, P. eds., 2006. Academic ethics. Ashgate.

Bradley, J., 2018. Integrity in higher education marketing and misleading claims in the university prospectus: what happened next… and is it enough?. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 14(1), pp.1-18.

Bratterud, H., Burgess, M., Fasy, B.T., Millman, D.L., Oster, T. and Sung, E.C., 2020, August. The sung diagram: revitalizing the Eisenhower matrix. In International Conference on Theory and Application of Diagrams (pp. 498-502). Springer, Cham.

Helgesson, G. and Eriksson, S., 2015. Plagiarism in research. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 18(1), pp.91-101.

Kirillov, A.V., Tanatova, D.K., Vinichenko, M.V. and Makushkin, S.A., 2015. Theory and practice of time-management in education. Asian Social Science, 11(19), pp.193-204.

Moles, J. and Wishart, L., 2016. Reading the map: Locating and navigating the academic skills development of pre-service teachers. Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice, 13(3), p.4.

Morris, E.J., 2016. Academic integrity: A teaching and learning approach. Handbook of academic integrity, pp.1037-1053.

Pears, R. and Shields, G., 2019. Cite them right: the essential referencing guide. Macmillan International Higher Education.

Pereira, O.P. and Costa, C.A.A.T., 2017. The importance of soft skills in the university academic curriculum: The perceptions of the students in the new society of knowledge.

Randall, M., 2016. Pragmatic plagiarism. University of Toronto Press.