One School, Five Programmes: Designing content-specific insessional support

Attending the in-sessional helped me understand how to write critically, based on evidence.

The sessions are light-hearted, fun and worth every minute spent learning in them. 

Student feedback, MSc Nutrition 2021/22

Insessional provision has been embedded in the School of Food Science and Nutrition for four years, across the five MSc programmes; Food Science, Food Science and Nutrition, Food Science (Food Biotechnology), Food Quality and Innovation, and Nutrition.  In Semester 1, the students are offered weekly 2-hour workshops, which focus on areas of academic language and literacy as identified by the programme and module leaders, and the students. These workshops run four times per week to accommodate both the large number of students, and the five different MSc programmes. Students can also book 1:1 appointments to discuss their individual academic needs. 

One of the biggest challenges in preparing the insessional provision is that the five MSc programmes do not have a core module in common. Different programmes take a number of different modules together, but there is not one module that unites all students. This brings challenges in both lesson preparation and timetabling. Furthermore, across these different programmes, students are exposed to, and write in, completely different genres, again having implications on the type of support that is required.  

Over the past few years, it has become clear that the MSc Nutrition programme is quite different to the other four programmes, with the students, for example, writing evaluative critiques and nutrition intervention plans, rather than lab reports. Therefore, this year I ran separate weekly workshops solely for these students. To prepare, I attended the lectures of two core modules run by the programme lead; Applied Nutritional Epidemiology and Nutrition: Policy and Practice, and was given access to the Teams groups, as well as being added to the Blackboard pages. I also worked closely with the programme lead, discussing how best to support the students in their assignments and areas of need that she had identified.  

One of the core components of the workshops was focusing on a specific assignment ‘Critique of a research paper’. We had access to a previous, high scoring, paper, so the workshops focused on analysing the structure, content and language of this paper, and the students then applying this knowledge to their own work. The students also booked 1:1 appointments to discuss this assignment further, depending on their own specific needs.  

By running separate workshops for these students, we were able to focus on their specific needs throughout the semester. This led to increased student motivation and participation, with no students withdrawing from the provision, and positive feedback at the end of the semester, including: 

‘The good thing about these workshop sessions is that Jenna really knows our module schedule. I think the reason is that she joined one of our modules. She understands what we need to prepare for that specific module and provides us with useful tips to aid that module’. 

 It also had an impact on their success. Following the semester, the programme lead emailed: 

'The MSc nutrition students were definitely better at critical analysis this year. Their critical appraisal assignments were excellent […] the marks being a couple of percentage points higher overall'.

From my point of view, successful insessional provision relies on a wide range of factors, and through providing separate workshops for the MSc Nutrition students, it is clear that these include the content being as specific to the students’ needs as possible, and a close working relationship with programme and module leads. The aim for the next academic year is to continue to develop this across all five MSc programmes.