Evolution of the journal club: a creative approach to ever-changing student needs

Building on a paper about an interdisciplinary journal club presented at the ALDCon23 (Winter and McLay, 2023), we explored the innovative ways in which we have adapted this approach to allow students to engage more easily. Feedback from the conference session and proceedings inspired ideas for developing the journal club model we had been using. A strength of the club was the involvement of staff from across our Learning Development team (LD librarian, LD adviser and maths and statistics specialist), but with limited staff availability, running four sessions was challenging. This, alongside feedback from student participants about the difficulty of attending multiple sessions, doing pre-reading and needing additional support for reading and analysis, pushed us to think creatively about how to adapt. Consequently, in 2024/25 we replaced the four-session model with a standalone workshop requiring no pre-reading. The workshop starts with a skim reading activity and makes use of an article analysis document, developed to empower students to understand and critique articles more effectively through discussion with their peers. This new format maintains the original aims and cross-discipline approach of the journal club, while giving both students and staff greater flexibility to engage. It also inspired several spin-off resources and workshops, including a statistics glossary, an innovative online reading room and a statistics workshop at a dissertation event. This session was of interest to delegates who support students with critical reading and analysis, considering how this approach could be employed despite resource and time shortages faced by many LD teams.