Embedding literacy for construction management students in Australian universities

![CDATA[Learning and Teaching strategies in higher education should be carefully chosen based on the nature of students and their learning approaches. Construction Management students in Australian Universities are regarded ‘non-traditional’ (either with little family history in university or, first time mature aged or, having prior industry experience) and therefore, may have specific literacy needs that are unexplored. Hence, this paper was aimed at exploring the specific literacy needs for construction management students and to identify strategies that would help to improve. Case study research method was used for this research. A first year teaching unit, in which literacy is embedded into the construction management context, in a popular construction management programme in Sydney, Australia was selected as the case study. The data collection included observations and evaluations of student assessment tasks in the selected unit over two offerings. Based on the findings on its first offering, some common literacy areas were identified that most students struggle with. Certain strategies to overcome these were then employed in the second offering such as development of online literacy modules with videos and quizzes; and lectures on specific literacy topics. The paper discusses the findings on the identified common literacy development areas and the effectiveness of these strategies in improving construction management students’ literacy. The findings will be useful to similar courses.]]