Personal and Academic Skills: Communication and Data Analysis

In your First semester Personal Academic Tutorial you will introduce yourself to your tutor and discuss your expectations of the course.

You will develop core skills required by Bioscience students in all disciplines. You will work within your tutor group to produce a poster on an academic member of staff to increase your knowledge of departmental research . You will reflect on this experience and use this to help them improve your group working skills.

Writing skills will form a key component of this module, you will discuss key themes in tutorials and take workshops to develop your skills (eg. note taking and academic integrity; how to cite sources; how to write figure and table legends). You will write an assessed essay putting these skills into practise, and to help with this process, you will submit a draft to their Personal Tutor for comments.

As part of this you will learn how to format documents using word processing software.
Understanding data is a key scientific skill and you will learn how to manage data using spreadsheets, check your data for normality, use means and standard deviations, decide on appropriate plots and apply basic statistical testing such as T-tests and chi-squares .

These skills will be tested using on-line quizzes. Core quantitative skills will be explored through workshops on concentrations, plotting graphs and Logs and Algebra.
Basic laboratory health and safety and laboratory techniques are vital across biosciences, these skills will be taught and examined. 

By the end of the module, you should be able to:

• Write a scientific essay, correctly formatted (i.e. figure legends and citations) and with a working knowledge of academic integrity.
• Work in a group to produce a poster, and reflect on the experience of group working.
• Understand and be able to apply basic descriptive statistics including means, standard deviation, plots and T-test and be able to demonstrate manipulative skills and problem solving.
• Know appropriate laboratory health and safety and be able to carry out basic laboratory procedures including pipetting and using a microscope.