Academic Knowledge and Skills

URL study guide

https://studiegids.vu.nl/en/courses/2024-2025/E_PM_AKS

Course Objective

• Research orientation: you are able to explain the difference between two research orientations: positivistic and interpretative;
• Academic reading: you are able to search, select, read, summarize and assess academic literature starting from a conceptual question;
• Academic topic choice: you are able to choose a topic for a literature review and describe its relevance for theory and practice;
• Academic writing: you are able to write in a clear way, with references complete, in a correct language and a good layout;
• Academic reviewing: you are able to write and present a literature review; and to review other’s (proposal for) literature review;
• Academic reasoning: you are able to formulate a research question and build an argumentation for a claim or conclusion.

Course Content

This course Academic Knowledge and Skills helps the premaster students in making the transition from a practice orientation to a theory orientation. As a bachelor student at a hogeschool or University of Applied Sciences you will have had training in research skills and have done a practice-based research project. In the SBE academic master programs you are required to do theory-based research. You will learn to understand the difference between practice-based research and theory-based research. We will explain and help you practice the skills you need in the academic world.

Teaching Methods

The course consists of two elements: lectures and workgroup seminars. During the course six lectures will be given. You are expected to attend all lectures as the workgroup seminars follow the topics of the lectures. The workgroups are specific to your specialization. Thus marketing students attend the marketing work group, strategy students the strategy work group and so on. Details about the work group assignments can be found in the manual of your workgroup on Canvas. Step by step these assignments will help you to write an academic paper.

Method of Assessment

The assessment for this course consists of two assignments; anindividual assignment which contributes 60% to your final grade and agroup assignment (40%). Your workgroup facilitator will grade yourindividual assignment. The group ssignment will be graded by the coursecoordinator. More information about the grading can be found in themanual of your workgroup.Please note that both components need to be completed with a grade of5.5 or higher. In case of a failing grade, it will not be possible to get credits from this course. In case there is an insufficient grade, a re-sit will be granted at the end of period 5. The maximum grade for students that need to rewrite their assignments after the first assessment is 5.5. Otherwise, it is just not fair to those that did not get extra time to improve their work.

Literature

• Lee, N & Lings, I (2013). Doing business research: A guide to theory and practice. London: Sage Publications.
• Scientific articles and course slides.

Additional Information

You do not have to register yourself for this course. You will be subscribed by the faculty for the course and the underlying activities.

Entry Requirements

The course is part of the pre-Master program of the Faculty of Economics and Business Administration. Participation is reserved for students of this pre-master program and other students who have been granted permission by the program director of the pre-master program.