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This paper discusses the role of formative feedback in teaching academic writing for a large class of first-year business students. The paper contributes to our knowledge on how to design an effective formative feedback process for a class in excess of 300 students. Based on survey data from 2018 the paper addresses how the students respond to being taught academic writing in two different feedback modalities: face-to-face interaction and electronic annotations. Our findings indicate that there are no significant differences between the two modalities and that the students are relatively satisfied with the feedback they received. The majority of the students report that feedback has helped them accomplish their learning goals, they pay attention to feedback, and feedback motivates them in their studies. Even with these positive responses from the students, we question whether our approach is sustainable in the long run. Unless smarter and more efficient ways of providing personalised feedback are developed for large student groups, the transition to the new paradigm for feedback, where the emphasis is placed on dialogic interaction, will not be practicable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summative assessment is often considered a motivator that drives students' learning. Higher education has a responsibility in promoting lifelong learning and assessment plays an important role in supporting students' capability to make evaluative judgements about their work and that of others. However, as research often focuses on formal pedagogical design, it is unclear what behaviours summative assessment prompts, thus the relationship between summative assessment, learning and evaluative judgement requires further investigation. Drawing on a small-scale ethnography-informed study, this paper adopts a practice theory approach to explore how undergraduate physics students from three year levels make evaluative judgements in the context of summative assessment tasks. The contexts explored through observations and interviews include a graded in-class tutorial, an out-of-class study group for an in-semester assignment, and individual preparation for examinations. The findings suggest that while summative assessment is a crucial aspect of students' learning context, it does not fully shape students' practices. Instead, students engage in incidental conversations about the quality of their work and how to do things in their studies. By focusing on what students actually do, this study integrates formal and informal aspects of students' learning, highlighting the tensions between undergraduate practices and intended learning outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback is justified when it has a positive influence on students' subsequent performance. Opportunities for student action need therefore to be consciously designed if feedback is to influence learning. In this paper, we discuss how ipsative design of feedback processes, i.e. involving comparison of a student's current performance with a previous similar task, can promote action from feedback. This design-based research was conducted with English for Academic Purposes students. A formative e-portfolio was implemented to facilitate students' access to their past work and feedback comments. Its aim was to explore how students exploit the ipsative design of feedback to build on both their own and teacher's actions. Analysis of student artefacts and interviews indicated that ipsative design prompts student comparison processes. Students were motivated to revisit their goals, make comparisons with previous work, and review peers' work. The effects of the design included motivation to engage with feedback beyond the immediate task and the revisiting of past work and action to improve it. Implications for teachers and curriculum designers are discussed including the need to create conditions for student action from feedback by including interconnected tasks and explicit comparison activities in the courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The growing trend for massification in higher education delivery has contributed to challenges in student engagement and experience. This has been further compounded by the global pandemic, with the sector experiencing reduced financial, staffing and resourcing budgets. The authors identified the delivery of meaningful feedback at scale as a critical emerging challenge. Although models of feedback exist within education, there are few discipline-agnostic frameworks for providing feedback that accounts for first-year education in the context of massification. With a focus on feedback within large-scale teaching and the first-year experience, and drawing on the authors' lived experiences, the paper proposes a conceptual non-disciplinary framework to scaffold the delivery of timely feedback in three stages. The proposed 'strategic framework for feedback at scale' promotes deeper first-year undergraduate students' learning and engagement across multiple teaching contexts through the feed-forward assessment design of automated ongoing feedback, peer-led staged feedback and teacher-led staged feedback. Examples of activities are discussed as well as steps for implementation applicable to tailoring to any discipline setting. Limitations and areas for future research are then discussed, calling for empirical research into the practice and effectiveness of the conceptual framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, attention is being turned toward the actions of students in relation to feedback. This paper presents the outcomes of a questionnaire study researching what undergraduate and postgraduate architecture students perceive as the purpose of feedback, how they use feedback on their coursework, and what makes them more likely to act on it. An overarching theme in their conception of feedback's purpose was that of a guide for improving coursework and learning. Two key dimensions that facilitated use over the longer term were feedback being generative and informing their working methods. The study revealed students engaging in a range of strategies with both formative and summative feedback to prioritise their next work; these could form the basis of facilitating wider adoption of these methods across the student body. There were similarities, but also substantial differences, between how undergraduate and postgraduate students reported perceiving and utilising feedback, which may have impact on feedback provision to enhance uptake and use. Whereas undergraduate students saw feedback's purpose in terms of directing improvement, postgraduates were more likely to see their own role in the process. Postgraduates were more likely to question feedback's validity over the longer term. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities around the world are encouraging teachers to provide more constructive feedback to support student learning, but do teachers know how to distinguish constructive feedback? What pedagogical practice is considered as feedback and what is not? For example, is a rubric a type of feedback? To date, very limited research has answered these questions from university teachers' perspectives and the current study aims to address this gap. In this study, ten teacher training workshops were conducted in a university in Hong Kong, with an intention to enhance teachers' competence in assessment and feedback. During the workshops, we first adopted Poll Everywhere to survey whether teachers (N = 248) recognise six types of common pedagogical practices as feedback, and subsequently used this as a base to discuss with teachers the reasons behind their responses. Findings reveal teachers' varied perceptions of these practices as feedback, which may be related to their varied understandings of feedback purposes. The paper calls for an explicit acknowledgement of the multiple purposes of feedback, and concludes with implications for teacher feedback literacy in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rubrics have been suggested as a means to foster students' evaluative judgement, the capacity to appraise their own work and that of others; however, empirical evidence of rubrics' effectiveness is still emerging. This paper contributes findings from a randomised controlled experiment on the effect of rubrics on evaluative judgement. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: a control group which evaluated peer-authored learning resources without the use of a rubric and an experiment group which carried out the evaluation using a three-item rubric based on (1) alignment with course content, (2) accuracy and (3) clarity. Both groups were asked to rate their confidence and provide comments to justify their scoring. The results showed a small effect size in increasing average agreement on the quality of learning resources in the experiment group. Analysis of comments reveals that criteria in and beyond the rubric guided participants' ratings of quality. The study provides evidence of the impact of rubrics on students' evaluative judgement and an example of how data-driven approaches and learning analytics can inform actionable design choices for embedding pedagogically supported strategies derived from the literature into actively operating educational technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the findings of a four-year mainly qualitative study of peer and self-assessment in university teaching. Peer and self-assessment activities were introduced with the intention of supporting students' learning, but they also formed part of the formal grading of the course assignment. Thus, the research aimed to explore the students' experiences with these activities in this specific learning situation – which benefits they perceived from these activities, what challenges they faced, and what supported their learning. The students completed the survey after participating in the activities, but before receiving their grades and peer feedback so as to capture their authentic experiences with the activities. A total of 103 students completed the survey. The data were analysed using descriptive statistics and thematic analysis. The results indicate that despite being stressful and uncomfortable for many, peer assessment was more beneficial for the students' learning than self-assessment. The students expressed concerns related to their competence to grade and responsibility for their peers' grades. However, by addressing students' needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness, these initial worries can be transformed into drivers for learning. It may be concluded that peer assessment can play a role in supporting students to self-assess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessment plays an important role in higher education, both guiding student learning and judging student success. However, assessment that treats all students the same is inequitable, since it ignores differences in students' past and present circumstances. A shift to assessment for inclusion is advocated to promote student equity; one that incorporates diverse students' perspectives on and experiences of assessment. A students-as-partners approach was taken to explore diverse students' experiences of assessment, and their suggestions to make assessment more inclusive. A team of six staff and five student partners undertook a co-research project, facilitating workshops with 52 students from diverse backgrounds to understand their assessment experiences. While assessment goals varied, students reported assessment was an emotional experience, citing challenges with assessment design, process and broader university support. These findings can be aligned and incorporated within a previously developed assessment design framework, demonstrating that students can make nuanced judgements about the quality of assessment design in relation to inclusion. Future work on assessment design which seeks to be inclusive can and should therefore routinely involve students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Student evaluation of teaching (SET) surveys are the most widely used tool for collecting higher education student feedback to inform academic quality improvement, promotion and recruitment processes. Malicious and abusive student comments in SET surveys have the potential to harm the wellbeing and career prospects of academics. Despite much literature highlighting abusive feedback in SET surveys, little research attention has been given to methods for screening student comments to identify and remove those that may cause harm to academics. This project applied innovative machine learning techniques, along with a dictionary of keywords to screen more than 100,000 student comments made via a university SET during 2021. The study concluded that these methods, when used in conjunction with a final stage of human checking, are an effective and practicable means of screening student comments. Higher education institutions have an obligation to balance the rights of students to provide feedback on their learning experience with a duty to protect academics from harm by pre-screening student comments before releasing SET results to academics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we sought to understand assessment-related attitudes and authentic experiences of evaluation anxiety with a sample of first-year university students. We focused on identifying: (a) why students had reported high levels of anxiety on a recent, grade-bearing assessment, and (b) how their attitudes toward assessment type and weighting influenced their views on anxiety and learning. Drawing on social constructivist principles, 31 first-year students in New Zealand participated in a 25-minute interview. Semi-structured interviews included open-ended items about students' experiences with anxiety, followed by a Q-sort task that structured dialogue around assessment attitudes. Results show that evaluation anxiety was reportedly caused by several factors, including students' doubts about their capabilities, concerns about insufficient time and time management, external pressures to be successful, unclear institutional standards for quality, and concerns about performing well on certain types of assessment. Students reported that oral presentations and high-stakes written tasks were more anxiety-inducing for them. Meanwhile, students reported that high-stakes written tasks, low-stakes tests, and low-stakes written tasks helped them learn more effectively than other assessment types and weightings. We discuss the implications of assessment design, including the challenges of evaluating students in a way that facilitates learning and limits unnecessary evaluation anxiety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a systematic review conducted to explore the primary research literature on student agency in higher education, as well as links between student agency and student learning. Out of more than 2,300 results, 42 articles published between 1980 and 2021 were assessed. Of these, 29 studies were included in a narrative review based on their centrality of student agency and methodological quality. We found that a student agency perspective is integrated into research focussed on assessment and feedback, globalisation and internationalisation, knowledge production, learning analytics, learning connections and transfer, real-life learning situations, and student-focussed teaching and learning. Our study reveals that researchers report a link between sources of agency and student agency, as well as between agency and individual outcomes, but the relationship between agency and societal outcomes requires further investigation. We argue that research must include holistic notions and critical discussions of agency for moving higher education practices and student agency literature forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feedback is a complex socio-cultural construct, utilising various modalities over the lifespan of a research candidature. This study reports findings from a review of global literature on supervisory feedback to postgraduate research students. Three focus questions guided the review: students' problems in receiving feedback, perceptions of positive feedback strategies, and potential improvements to the feedback process. The review method combined a systematic search process with explicit inclusion and exclusion criteria applied to literature published over the last decade. A detailed content analysis of 43 articles is reported in a thematically ordered narrative. Findings suggested that problems with feedback were found to be caused by the content, processes involved and the expectations of those involved. Second, feedback strategies that positively impacted learning and teaching capabilities of both students and supervisors were identified as most effective. Third, improvements to the feedback process were canvassed through the three key actors of institutions, supervisors and students, providing insights into the synergistic relationship among these actors. Further research is warranted as feedback processes and products are at the mercy of research supervision, which is increasingly operating in online environments spanning different time zones, with professional, cultural and linguistic diversities impacting feedback processes and products. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For several decades research into the student evaluation of teaching has periodically found an association between how well students like an instructor and the evaluations. The association has been largely ignored, being seen as an indicator of bias, or as a statistical or procedural artifact. However, these interpretations may be obscuring a more fundamental hypothesis. It is possible that the evaluations, instead of being a measure of 'good' or 'effective' teaching as commonly conceived, are actually a measure of a student-perceived construct similar to likability. This study looks directly at the influence of likability on the student evaluation of teaching. Knowing nothing about an instructor or how a class was taught, students' perception of likability accounted for two-thirds of the total variance of the evaluations. The student evaluation of teaching could be replaced with a single likability measure, with little loss of predictability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learning is not just determined by the curriculum, but by how it is assessed. This article focuses on the analysis of the role played by the quality of assessment tasks on learning in undergraduate courses. During two successive academic years, information was collected on the views of students on the assessment activities and practices that they had experienced in subjects in business and economics with the aim of examining what influenced their perception of assessment tasks. A causal relationship model was developed which included key variables such as participation, self-regulation, learning transfer, strategic learning, feedback and empowerment (learner control). It was validated using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The relationships between assessment task quality and these variables were explored. Feedback, participation, empowerment and self-regulation were identified as mediating effects of the quality of assessment tasks on learning. The results highlight how assessment practices in higher education can be enhanced through improvements in the design of assessment and suggestions are offered on future lines of research that will allow a better understanding of the effectiveness of assessment processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]