Dr Tiffany Chiu

Summary

Tiffany Chiu is a Principal Teaching Fellow in Educational Development at Imperial College London. She is Director of the PG Cert in University Learning and Teaching and teaches on all levels of Imperial College’s MEd in ULT (PG Cert, PG Diploma and MEd). She supports academic staff across disciplines to enhance learning, teaching and assessment practices. Prior to joining Imperial, she supported foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate students with their development of academic literacy and research skills for over ten years. She also initiated a range of formative and summative assessments to promote a skill-and-subject-content balanced curriculum for student engagement. She is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

Dr Chiu has a PhD in Applied Linguistics, with specialism in Academic Language and Literacy, completed at King’s College London. She did her Master of Science in Education degree in TESOL at the University of Pennsylvania, USA and BA in English Language & Applied Linguistics at Yuan Ze University, Taiwan. Her teaching and research interests include student transition and progression, learning and teaching in higher education, assessment and feedback practice, and identity development in higher education. She has led and collaborated on a range of pedagogic research, which provides innovative and inclusive approaches that foreground the embedment of academic skills for employability and lifelong learning into the subject curriculum. She is experienced in NVivo, where she delivered training sessions at King’s College London and the University of West London.

Tiffany is currently leading the Learning Well Project which looks into students’ current study strategies and learning behaviours, and the impact of these on their wellbeing. The team aims to work with student support services and departments across the University to synergise new and existing resources and expertise and co-develop these into a flexible student wellbeing learning programme. The aim of this will be to engage students with evidence-based learning and wellbeing strategies to consider their study approaches and scaffold students to recognise learning behaviours linked to improved wellbeing. 

She is Principal Investigator for the Supporting the Identity Development of Underrepresented Students (SIDUS) project, aimed at promoting inclusion and supporting success for Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine (STEMM) students from underrepresented groups at the University. She worked with a colleague from the University of Reading on a project which looks into high-achieving ‘non-traditional’ students as well as the concept of the ‘ideal’ student in higher education. This research built on widening participation literature and debates which aimed to provide practical and policy recommendations to bridge the gap in attainment outcomes for different students. 

Tiffany previously led an action research project (‘Do you write as well as you speak? The Enhancement of Scholarship through Research Partnership for Social Science Students’) which foregrounded the use of the speaking-writing connection to support student development of academic voice and identities. She also worked on another action research which aimed to raise student writers’ awareness of the features of Personal Statements for MA/PhD programmes and support them to be socialised into the international research community. The intervention was based on a genre-based approach through the WeChat instant online messenger app to the teaching of postgraduate application essay to a wide range of Chinese students applying for MA/PhD studies abroad.

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