Students joining the integrated MSc Cosmetic Science course need to have at least one Science A-level or equivalent. In line with the needs of the course, students begin their course with Applied Biology (which I lead) and Applied Chemistry. Consequentially, about 50% of the Year 1 cohort will have basic knowledge of either of the two subjects, with only a small percentage having taken both subjects at a ‘high school’ equivalent level. At the same time, about 55-65% of the cohort each year is made of native English speakers (primarily Home status) with the other 35-45% being non-native English speakers (UAL Central Planning Unit, 2024).
These pose a two-pronged challenge for me and the unit I lead at this level; half of the students do not have a basic background in the subject of Biology and/or a big majority of the cohort might have the necessary knowledge but in a different language. Generally, STEM subjects are based in the universal understanding and use of a very specific and highly technical terminology which means that a lot of our students have the additional ‘task’ of learning a new vocabulary, along with adjusting to higher education, in order to be able to participate in taught classes and engage with readings.
To meet the needs of students I have redeveloped the curriculum to firstly include a series of sessions at the beginning of the unit where the basic concepts and terminology of Biology are taught, and secondly the students were actively encouraged through guided online tools to create a shared glossary of terms that would be useful for the entirety of their course.
The creation of a shared glossary did not seem to be a task which the students were willing to complete especially when it was not part of a timetabled session, but the majority would add entries if the activity was embedded in lecture slides or similar. This might have been due to a few reasons; the students might have not realised the value of the exercise, they might not have been comfortable to post in a public forum even if anonymously, they might have not been used to a collaborative curriculum, but also it might have been an issue from my site such as not having explained the exercise and its purpose well. Afterall, perceived importance of learning was found to positively influence the relationship between participation intention and outcomes in online discussion forums (Yang et al., 2007). Nevertheless, to help the students become comfortable with the glossary exercise, I switched my approach to a simpler method and asked students to create a document on their devices which would act as their own personal glossary of terms hence removing the public aspect of the exercise and giving the students agency on what words they thought would be most useful for them to include. At every session, and while delivering content, every time a new or more technical word came up, I would pause the lesson and suggest that they could take a minute to add the term on their glossaries. This approach seemed to be more acceptable and used more often, than the first iteration with the public tool. In the future, I will emphasise the importance of this activity on the students’ learning to increase participation intention. In the interest of accessibility, both modes of this exercise (online forum and personal documentation) could be used from now on, depending on what each individual student believes is more beneficial to them.
References:
UAL Central Planning Unit (2024) Student Profiles: Characteristics. Available at: https://dashboards.arts.ac.uk/dashboard/ActiveDashboards/DashboardPage.aspx?dashboardid=5c6bb274-7645-4500-bb75-7e334f68ff24&dashcontextid=638681486282992055 (Accessed: 10/03/2025).
Yang, X., Li, Y., Tan, C. and Teo, H. (2007) ‘Students’ participation intention in an online discussion forum: Why is computer-mediated interaction attractive?’, Information & management, 44(5), pp. 456–466. doi: 10.1016/j.im.2007.04.003.