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A concern that has been raised with the transition from pen and paper examinations to electronic examinations is whether this will make cheating easier. This article investigates how teachers and students perceive the differences in ease of cheating during three types of written examination: paper exams, bring your own device e-exams and e-exams using university-owned devices. It also investigates perceptions about the effectiveness of some typical countermeasures towards cheating across these examination types. A mixed-method approach was used, combining questionnaires and interviews with students and teachers in the authors’ own university. A total of 212 students and 162 teachers participated in the questionnaire survey, and then, a more limited number were interviewed to get a deeper understanding of the results. Six-different cheating practices were considered – impersonation, forbidden aids, peeking, peer collaboration, outside assistance and student–staff collusion and seven different countermeasures were considered – proctors, biometry, mingling, shuffling, random drawing, sequencing and broadcasting. Both students and teachers perceived cheating as easier with e-exams, and especially with bring your own device. They also thought some countermeasures would be easier to implement with e-exams.

A series of studies have found gender bias in student evaluations of teaching. Evidence from several observational studies show that women are evaluated lower than men. These findings are supported by experimental studies aimed at isolating the effect of a possible gender bias from other differences between male and female teachers. In this paper, we conduct two experiments in Denmark to test whether a similar gender bias is present in a national context that is generally considered among the most gender equal. Study one investigates differences in the evaluation of two similar presentations by teachers reported to be either male or female. Study two focuses on the evaluation of teaching material prepared by teachers presented as men and women respectively. The two studies arrive at similar conclusions: There is no gender bias in favor of men in the evaluations made by students. The paper discusses the implications of these findings. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2022.2048355.

Teachers’ feedback literacy is a focus of increasing attention in higher education. It may be framed through intentional design decisions, inter-relational aspects of engagement and pragmatic considerations of enacted curricula. Thus, teachers’ feedback literacy is connected to both the enacted curriculum and students’ relationship to feedback. How these connections take shape in particular approaches to the curriculum, affecting students’ roles in feedback and evaluation is not as well-understood. This paper presents findings from an intervention aimed at developing students’ peer feedback and self-evaluation skills in an undergraduate business course. Peer feedback and self-evaluation are increasingly common modes of engaging students as active participants in feedback and evaluation processes. It is therefore worthwhile to understand the ways in which these processes affect and link teacher and student feedback literacy. Data was analysed from a 14-week course aimed at developing students’ competencies in self-evaluation, peer feedback and teamwork. Results are presented and discussed according to three major areas: how teacher’s feedback on student engagement with feedback served as affective ‘meta’ scaffolding, the trajectory of students’ growth in feedback literate self-evaluation, and the relationship of feedback literacy to trajectory of growth in teamwork competencies. The paper concludes with suggestions for further, crossdisciplinarity research. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

This paper reports on an interdisciplinary pedagogical research project involving academic literacy experts and lecturers at a School of Nursing. Specifically, the paper focusses on the development...

This paper focuses on the relationship between social aspects and individual agency in digital education, analysed in the context of online peer assessment in a first-semester course. Applying the adapted participation gestalt framework to identify how a particular form of participation emerges, and how it is constituted, individual interviews and focus group meetings with 13 Danish students were carried out. The analysis highlights a number of signs accumulated by students to construct their participation in the interaction. These signs argue against simplistic accounts of student agency in educational research, whereby student agency is approached as an individual and cognitive phenomenon and relationships as stable and unproblematic. The paper argues that student agency should not automatically be assumed possible as part of digital education or digital student-centred learning activities. Instead, the social aspects of educational interactions need to be taken into consideration when presenting digital education as a means to enhance student agency.

The emergence of personalised data technologies, such as learning analytics is framed as a solution to manage the needs of higher education student populations that are growing ever more diverse and larger in size. However, the current approach to learning analytics presents tensions between increasing student agency in making learning-related decisions and ‘datafying’ students in the process of collecting, analysing and interpreting data. This paper presents a study that explores staff and student experience of agency, equity, and transparency in existing data practices and expectations towards learning analytics in a UK university. The results show a number of intertwined factors that have contributed to the tensions between enhancing a learner’s control of their studies and, at the same time, diminishing their autonomy as an active agent in the process of learning analytics. This paper argues that learner empowerment should not be automatically assumed to have taken place as part of the adoption of learning analytics. Instead, the interwoven power relationships in a complex educational system and the interactions between humans and machines need to be taken into consideration when presenting learning analytics as an equitable process to enhance student agency and educational equity.

Formative assessment is widely accepted as being crucial to promoting student learning and, since 2010, the UK General Medical Council has mandated its use in workplace-based clinical training for all new doctors. As a result, the Royal College of Radiologists (RCR) instituted a range of formative workplace-based assessments including the Radiology Direct Observation of Procedural Skills (Rad-DOPS), in which supervisors appraise trainees’ performance in carrying out clinical procedures. This paper reports on the quality of the written feedback in 2,500 Rad-DOPS online feedback forms in addressing the aims of the new assessment approach. Random samples of 500 were selected from the first three years of the new assessment implementation, 2010–13, and from 2016 to 17. Using an appropriate coding frame, the feedback was analysed across the samples against key trainee attributes including stage of training and level of adjudged competence. Criteria for identifying high quality feedback were derived from the literature and a simplified form of qualitative comparative analysis was used to identify the conditions associated with high quality feedback. An average of 97% of the assessments contained written feedback but the number of instances of high quality feedback was found to be exceedingly small at around 5%. The paper offers suggestions for making the feedback process more purposeful in achieving the aims of formative assessment.

Articles discussing and analysing student peer-review activities proliferate the educational literature, typically describing one or more class exercises where students provide feedback on each other’s work. These papers usually focus on a peer-review activity designed as a scholarly study, and make conclusions about its success or otherwise. There is not one standard model for ‘peer-review’, and information on the many different assessment designs used is distributed over an increasing number of publications and websites. This paper provides a meta-review of peer-review activities as they are implemented in practice, using configuration data from over a thousand assignments conducted using an online peer-review system during an eight-year period. We present data on the wide variety of assignment designs and the parameters that comprise them, their rubrics, and comparisons between subject areas. Information on the norms and range of all decisions to be made will encourage instructors (both new to ...

Departments and programmes in higher education are required to participate in an increasing number of programme, course and student assessments. These assessment requirements are also opportunities to develop student skills related to scientific literacy and research, if students are included in the process of developing, administering and interpreting these assessments. This paper describes a course designed to build student research skills through incorporating undergraduate students into the process of programme review for a psychology department, a comprehensive assessment required of this department every five years. This course proved to be an effective way to engage students, as students developed and administered assessment surveys, analysed and interpreted results, and prepared both a professional report for the department as well as a research presentation. The paper discusses recommended course activities, and shows how this opportunity can benefit students and faculty in a myriad of ways.

Research comparing continuous assessment (e.g. coursework) with examinations generally reveals a student preference for the former. The perceived increased use of continuous assessment periodically captures media attention, with claims of greater numbers of higher degree classifications being awarded. This paper takes a case-study approach to investigate the extent to which different types of assessment allow students to effectively demonstrate and apply their learning. By considering data gathered from second-level, undergraduate students completing 60 point, online psychology modules, this paper investigates assessment effectiveness in terms of student satisfaction, pass rate and level of pass rate. Findings reveal that modules with an end of module assessment (EMA), rather than an examination, have higher completion and pass rates. Whilst students who took a seen examination also performed well, those who completed an unseen examination recorded the lowest overall pass and completion rates, des...

Despite compelling evidence of its potential effectiveness, uptake of self and peer assessment in higher education has been slower than expected. As with other assessment practices, self and peer assessment is ultimately enabled, or inhibited, by the actions of individual academics. This paper explores what academics see as the benefits and challenges of implementing self and peer assessment, through the analysis of interviews with 13 Australian academics. Thematic analysis of our qualitative data identified seven themes of benefits and five challenges. Our academics showed strong belief in the power of self and peer assessment as formative assessment, contrary to past literature which has focussed on the accuracy of students’ marking. This paper therefore brings insights as to not only what academics value about self and peer assessment but also identifies potential inhibitors in practice. Recommendations are made about improving the design and implementation of self and peer assessment in higher...

Australian universities have a long history of use of student satisfaction surveys. Their use has expanded and purpose changed over time. The surveys are often viewed as distorted by external influences such as discipline context, class size and year level of participants. This paper reports on the results of a large-scale investigation interrogating the influence of class size on student satisfaction ratings. The investigation was conducted at a large, comprehensive, research-intensive Australian university. It drew on the data from a survey administered to all students in all units of undergraduate and postgraduate study conducted across the university over four semesters. Data were collated into four class size categories. This categorised data were subjected to statistical analyses. This paper discusses the approach taken, the results of the analysis and their implications for student evaluation of teaching and learning.

Internal quality assurance systems are expected to improve the institutions’ core mission of teaching and learning. Using data gathered through an online survey, distributed in 2014/2015, to the teaching staff of all Portuguese private and public higher education institutions, this paper examines the impact of internal quality assurance systems on teaching and learning from the perspective of academics. Findings suggest that Portuguese academics feel that, despite the positive contribution of internal quality assurance towards an increased awareness of teaching quality issues at their institutions, the practical effects of these systems have been more related to increasing bureaucracy than to substantive improvements in teaching and learning. The use of information with a view to improvement and teaching staff involvement in the development of quality assurance were found to induce positive changes in teaching and learning, in academics’ perceptions. Based on the findings, the paper makes recommen...

While feedback in education is important, formative feedback that leads to improvement in students’ learning outcomes and emotional disposition is vital. This argument has been made repeatedly in the Western literature, both by researchers and by students participating in their research in higher education. This paper presents both affective and non-affective improvement as the most frequently occurring theme identified in a mixed-methods study conducted at a National Key University in mainland China, which investigated 232 Chinese students’ experiences and expectations of feedback from their Chinese tutors. This paper, thus, concludes that mainland Chinese university students and Western researchers and students likely agree on the primary function of tutor feedback. The desire for tutor feedback to also or chiefly play a formative role appears not to be a geographically or culturally specific phenomenon.

Feedback plays an integral role in students’ learning and development, as it is often the only personal communication that students have with tutors or lecturers about their own work. Yet, in spite of its integral role in student learning there is disagreement between how students and tutors or lecturers perceive the pedagogic purpose of feedback. Central to this disagreement is the role that feedback has to play in ensuring that students produce the ‘right’ kinds of knowledge, and become the ‘right’ kinds of knowers within their disciplines. This paper argues that in order to find common ground between students and tutors or lecturers on what feedback is for, and how to both give and use it effectively, we need to conceptualise disciplinary knowledge and knowers anew. We offer, as a useful starting point, the Specialisation dimension of Legitimation Code Theory as both practical theory and methodological tool for exploring knowledge and knowers in English Studies and Law as two illustrative cases. The paper concludes that this analysis offers lecturers and tutors a fresh understanding of the disciplinary knowledge and knower structures they work within and, relatedly, a clearer view of the work their feedback needs to do within these.

The analysis of exemplars is a potentially powerful way of acquainting students with academic standards and supporting their capacities to make informed academic judgements. This paper investigates the role of dialogue in supporting students to develop their appreciation of the nature of quality work. The research derives from a project involving nine teachers in a Faculty of Education, and uses data from a single case to analyse the dialogic use of exemplars. The findings illustrate how the teacher prioritised student talk and withheld his own evaluative judgements in the management of the discussion. A related dilemma lies in the balance between the student voice in constructing their views on the nature of quality and explicit teacher guidance. The main significance of the paper lies in its description of how exemplars dialogue can be orchestrated, and a discussion of some of the main features of the dialogue.

The paper analyses the impact of programme accreditation in Portugal further to the operations of the Agency for Assessment and Accreditation of Higher Education, which were initiated in 2009. Tracking the evolution of study programmes, the paper found that, out of the initial 5262 programmes on offer in 2009/2010, 40% have been either discontinued or not accredited as of July 2015. The analysis revealed differences between the private and the public sectors, with higher proportions of discontinuations and closures in the former. For the discipline with the highest percentage of non-accredited programmes (Law), the main reasons for denied accreditation were analysed. The identified reasons were related to a lack of academic quality, for example, the programmes’ lack of compliance with legal requirements regarding teaching staff qualifications and full-time employment, the blurred identity of programmes, undifferentiated between university and polytechnic sectors, or curricular inconsistencies. The...

The main objective of this research was to review the characteristics of portfolios and their outcomes for teaching professionalism to undergraduate medical students. A systematic review on the use of portfolios in teaching professionalism to medical students identified 1257 papers. Of these, 11 articles met all inclusion criteria. According to the papers, the use of portfolios for teaching professionalism shows versatility, supports learning strategies and has the potential to be used in different contexts, including for formative and summative purposes. The weaknesses were based on the artificiality of the reflections, deficient instructions, time-consuming processes and preference among students for other teaching methods. Students complained about feeling that the reflection was ‘forced’, and they tended to write based on social conventions rather than reveal their true thoughts. Reflection is a powerful component of the portfolio, but the method by which it is taught could easily ruin its pot...

As higher education systems and institutions expand, more energy is being invested in ensuring that sufficient learning has been achieved to warrant the award of a qualification. Many commonly used assessment approaches do not scale well, and there remains a pressing need for reform. This paper distils insights from international investigations of student learning outcomes assessment, using this analysis to chart frontiers for innovation. This paper sets out principles for guiding change in this field, presents an evaluation of progress via a review of signature assessment initiatives, reviews likely facilitators and blockers and, through these analyses, derives a strategy for spurring development.

The relationship between assessment and learning in higher education often comes down to a single thing: a grade. Despite widespread criticism of grades as inexact tools, whose overemphasis undermines student learning and negatively affects student well-being, they continue to be the norm in the assessment of student learning. This paper analyses an alternate form of assessment: so-called ‘gradeless learning’. This study theoretically and geographically contextualises the recent implementation of a gradeless learning policy at a large public university in Asia, and presents findings from a student opinion survey about the policy. The paper shows that respondents overwhelmingly understand and often agree with the central claims of gradeless learning, including its potential to ease students into college life, allow them to make more daring choices in their studies and even develop as lifelong learners. However, the aim of relieving stress among one group of students has increased stress for others. The stu...

© 2015 Taylor & Francis. A variety of understandings of feedback exist in the literature, which can broadly be categorised as cognitivist information transmission and socio-constructivist. Understanding feedback as information transmission or ‘telling’ has until recently been dominant. However, a socio-constructivist perspective of feedback posits that feedback should be dialogic and help to develop students’ ability to monitor, evaluate and regulate their learning. This paper is positioned as part of the shift away from seeing feedback as input, to exploring feedback as a dialogical process focusing on effects, through presenting an innovative methodological approach to analysing feedback dialogues in situ. Interactional analysis adopts the premise that artefacts and technologies set up a social field, where understanding human–human and human–material activities and interactions is important. The paper suggests that this systematic approach to analysing dialogic feedback can enable insight into previously undocumented aspects of feedback, such as the interactional features that promote and sustain feedback dialogue. The paper discusses methodological issues in such analyses and implications for research on feedback.

The lament that ‘students can’t write’ remains loud and defiant, even after years of research pointing to the myriad factors that make students’ writing challenging, particularly when they move into university. This paper reports on a longitudinal, ethnographic study which explored students’ writing ‘in transition’, from A-levels to university in the UK, through the critical lens offered by the academic literacies conceptual framing. This paper offers critical analysis of the ways that students, teachers and institutions position writing at A-level and university, exploring the assumptions and beliefs that underpin their understandings and practices using Ivanic’s framework of discourses of writing. The analysis proposes that the centrality of assessment in the treatment of language at both levels creates an ‘assessment discourse of writing’, which originates in school, and becomes a defining and restrictive frame for students’ writing as they move into higher education. The analysis further suggests that...

This article takes a dual focus on the theme of student formative peer assessment. On the one hand it offers a thorough literature review in this field, while on the other it unpacks a case study of curriculum design where peer assessment has been adopted. The practical example draws on recent changes made to a third- and final-year undergraduate research dissertation course in a UK architectural school. Although peer assessment worked quite well in this small setting, similar findings might be uncovered when scaled up to larger cohorts, as well as other disciplines and year groups. The research findings are certainly relevant for other contexts. Qualitative research from a focus group with six students on the course informs the empirical body of the paper. Through engaging with students’ reflections, as well as the relevant literature, and reflexively looking at the curriculum changes, this paper discusses some of the benefits and drawbacks that can arise from peer assessment in this context. Peer assess...

This paper describes an intervention for improving the quality of peer assessment conferences in calculus. Although a body of work highlights the learning benefits of peer assessment, few papers have described the nature of student conversations during peer conferences/assessment in detail. This paper provides deeper insight into what those conversations actually look like, and shows the impact of systematic training on conferences. The study took place over two consecutive semesters of introductory college calculus, and analyses show that students had considerably improved conversations after training. The improved conversations consisted of much more on-topic talk and productive feedback; after training, students provided more feedback related to processes (communication and underlying reasoning) than products (correctness or incorrectness).

There is now a worldwide focus on the quality of university teaching and yet there is general dissatisfaction in universities with the student evaluation of teaching system. Peer observation of teaching seems to hold much promise in the assessment of teaching quality, but such observation pays little attention to the quality of teaching as perceived by students. One approach to overcome this deficiency is for faculty and students to also partner in the assessment of a faculty member’s teaching, with a student trained in observation and feedback techniques acting as a peer in the observation process. This paper describes and evaluates an ongoing student consultant initiative at Lingnan University in Hong Kong. It presents faculty and student observations in terms of the benefits to faculty regarding potential enhancement of university teaching, and the benefits to students especially in terms of close collaboration with faculty and training in consultation techniques. The paper notes that the student consu...

It is clear from the literature that feedback is potentially the most powerful and potent part of the assessment cycle when it comes to improving further student learning. However, for some time, there has been a growing amount of research evidence that much feedback practice does not fulfil this potential to influence future student learning because it fails in a host of different ways. This dilemma of the disjuncture between theory and practice has been increasingly highlighted by the UK National Student Survey results. This paper uses a model of the assessment process cycle to frame understandings drawn from the literature, and argues that the problem with much current practice resides largely in a failure to effectively engage students with feedback. The paper goes on to explore how best to effectively engage students with assessment feedback, with evidenced examples of feedback strategies that have successfully overcome this problem.

Several times each year the teaching performance of academics at higher education institutions are evaluated through anonymous, online Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) surveys. Universities use SET surveys to inform decisions about staff promotion and tenure. But low student participation levels make the surveys impractical for this use. This scoping review aims to explore student motivations, perceptions, and opinions of SET survey completion. Five EBSCO® databases were searched using key words: “student evaluation of teaching” OR “student evaluation*” OR “student rating*” OR “student satisfaction” OR “teach* evaluation” OR “teach* effective*” OR “teach* performance OR “student feedback*” OR “student survey” AND “higher*education” OR university OR college OR tertiary. Thematic analysis of a meta-synthesis of qualitative findings derived from 21 papers identified five themes: (i) The value students’ place on SET, (ii) the knowledge that SET responses are acted upon to improve teaching, (iii) assurance of survey confidentiality and anonymity, (iv) incentives for completing SET, and (v) survey design and timing of survey release. Perceptions, knowledge, and attitudes about the value of SET are essential factors in motivating students to engage and complete SETs, particularly if surveys are easy to interpret, time for completion is incentivised, and responses are valued.

Within higher education student evaluations of teaching (SET) are used to inform evaluations of performance of courses and teachers. An anonymous online survey was constructed and implemented using Qualtrics. This study was situated within a more extensive study investigating the impact of narrative SET comments on teaching quality and the health and wellbeing of academic staff. This paper reports specifically on two open questions that were designed to elicit examples of non-constructive and offensive anonymous narrative feedback. Five themes were identified: allegations; insults; comments about appearance, attire and accent; projections and blame; and threats and punishment. These are represented in non-redacted form. Personally destructive, defamatory, abusive and hurtful comments were commonly reported. These kinds of comments may have adverse consequences for the well-being of teaching staff, could contribute to occupational stress and in some cases could be considered libellous. The high prevalence of offensive comments accessible to and shared by teachers may be a reflection of the anonymity afforded to respondents using internet surveys, resulting in de-individuation and enabling some respondents to give voice to ‘hate speech’ which has no place in evaluations of teaching.

This paper proposes a new way of flipping small group classes in quantitative courses by active reading and peer marking using the virtual learning environment. We aim to engage students in the learning material by attempting a problem followed by peer marking based on some given solution guideline before they are exposed to another similar problem to solve during the small group classes. We design a quasi-experiment to evaluate the effect of peer marking by introducing an incentive in one such problem set and not in the other. The solution to the class problem is to act as the ‘incentive’, to be released only to the participants of the peer assessment. Using the data of two units from two UK universities and ‘incentives’ as instrumental variables to participation, our quantitative findings reveal the effect of participating in one more peer marking as a 3% increase in final marks on average. The qualitative analysis based on focus group discussions shows that the process increases student engagement, satisfaction, confidence and overall learning responsibility. The challenges often lie to establish a clear understanding of the purpose and the process of peer marking to ensure student buy-in to the system.

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.

Feedback is the key ingredient from which we grow. This paper contributes to the literature on student feedback in higher education, specifically within work-based learning. It provides an overview...

We examine the effects of computer-based versus paper-based assessment of critical thinking skills, adapted from English (in the U.S.) to Chinese. Using data collected based on a random assignment ...

This paper argues that development of students’ evaluative judgement capability, which encapsulates a range of cognitive and social skills, should be considered as a primary objective of the collab...

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.

Teamwork is one of the most important competences for most professionals, and it is therefore imperative that it be included in university education programmes, yet its evaluation continues to pose challenges. This paper reports on part of a study into the self and peer evaluation of teamwork, research which was carried out in order to analyse teamwork dynamics among students on degree courses in different disciplines, and how these relate to the outcome of teamwork and the grades obtained by each team member. The views of 351 students studying five subjects on five different degree courses were analysed, with participants divided into 95 groups. The results show that effective teamwork is related to higher grades and higher quality products. The weighting of the grade awarded to teamwork in the final subject grade conditions students’ assessment of how well the team has functioned, as does the grade each student receives from their teammates. Those teams that view their team as functioning best distribute equal grades among their teammates. The results also show that those students who assess themselves positively do the same for their peers

Although dialogue can augment the impact of feedback on student learning, dialogic feedback is unaffordable by instructors teaching large classes. In this regard, peer feedback can offer a scalable and effective solution. However, the existing practices optimistically rely on students’ discussion about feedback and lack a systematic design approach. In this paper, we propose a theoretical framework of collaborative peer feedback which structures feedback dialogue into three distinct phases and outlines the learning processes involved in each of them. Then, we present a web-based platform, called Synergy, which is designed to facilitate collaborative peer feedback as conceptualised in the theoretical framework. To enable instructor support and facilitation during the feedback practice, we propose a learning analytics support integrated into Synergy. The consolidated model of learning analytics, which concerns three critical pieces for creating impactful learning analytics practices, theory, design and data science, was employed to build the analytics support. The learning analytics support aims to guide instructors’ class-wide actions toward improving students’ learning experiences during the three phases of peer feedback. The actionable insights that the learning analytics support offers are discussed with examples.

In this paper we examine the history and development of internal assessment practices at a university in New Zealand. The work re-visits the ‘assessment arms race’ study and builds upon the key arg...

Authentic assessment has theorised benefits for student outcomes in higher education. More needs to be done, however, to empirically test relationships between the critical elements of authenticity and student outcomes, particularly in online learning environments. In this paper we examine whether an online simulation-based learning and assessment design, developed using the tools and functionality within the available university online ecosystem, has measurable ‘authenticity’ in a postgraduate course. In addition, we assess whether the simulation is associated with improvements in student learning behaviours and outcomes. We analyse qualitative data from lecturer and student interviews and student work submitted online, as well as data analytics from the learning management system in both control and experimental conditions. Seven critical elements of authentic assessment were identified including new aspects of authenticity relating to simulation-specific affordances (e.g. emotional content, temporal dimensions and unpredictability). Students watched lecture videos and participated in online discussion more frequently in the online simulation than in the control condition and indicated perceived mastery of, and confidence in, the learning outcomes. These findings make important contributions to authentic assessment theory and have practical implications for simulations built in online ecosystems available in higher education.

The literature on improving student engagement with assessment and feedback has a tendency to treat all students as if they are the same. Students with lower levels of attainment are generally underrepresented within empirical studies and their feedback behaviours are less well understood. The recent drive to improve student assessment and feedback literacy and the move from ‘feedback’ being information about a task to being a process of understanding and using performance information is a larger conceptual leap for some students than others. In this paper, we consider issues surrounding the transition to new modes of feedback, focusing on what is needed for those who find study difficult and persistently are disappointed by their levels of attainment, to benefit from and take advantage of our feedback pedagogies. We examine literature advocating strategies such as increasing agency, using praise, developing feedback literacy and cultivating a growth mind-set. We argue that students who underachieve may benefit from strong relationships with educators and peers; exposure to feedback rich, low stakes environments, which permit repeated integrations of practice and feedback and building feedback literacy through peer assessment activities.

Contract cheating sites advertise that they provide high quality, undetectable, bespoke work delivered in a timely manner to students purchasing their assignments. This paper tests contract cheatin...

This paper reports on findings from a large Australian research project that explored the relationship between contract cheating and assessment design. Using survey responses from 14,086 students and 1147 educators at eight universities, a multivariate analysis examined the influence of a range of factors on the likelihood that different assessment types would prompt considerations of contract cheating in students. Perceptions of likelihood were highest among students who speak a language other than English at home. Perceptions of likelihood were also higher among students who reported there to be lots of opportunities to cheat, and amongst students who were dissatisfied with the teaching and learning environment. Perceptions of likelihood for certain assessment types were also higher in commerce and engineering than in any other discipline. Overall, four assessment types were perceived by students to be the least likely to be outsourced, however these are also the least likely to be set by educators. The analysis indicates that educators are more likely to use these assessment tasks when they report positively on organisational support for teaching and learning Refereed/Peer-reviewed

A key challenge for feedback practice involves promoting student uptake through the closing of feedback loops. This paper investigates feedback loops by using the concepts of single and double-loop...

Student feedback can be used to enable institutions to achieve the best possible outcomes for students through informing changes which enhance the quality of teaching and learning. Following the introduction of an online survey platform to gather student feedback at a top-performing UK university, anecdotal concerns raised by academics suggested students were being more critical. This exploratory study investigated the effects of switching from a paper to an online survey by comparing the open-ended responses between the two methods of collection. The main contribution of this study is the development of an analytical framework which can be used by other institutions to evaluate student comments, in order to understand and improve the student experience. Three key findings in this study were uncovered. Firstly, the quality of student feedback is not undermined by a switch to a more efficient online collection. Secondly, student comments via both methods of collection predominantly continue to focu...

This paper analyses teaching and non-teaching staff perceptions on the implementation of internal quality assurance (QA) practices at their higher education institutions. The aim is to understand how far different perspectives on quality – as culture, as compliance or as consistency – are reflected in the views of these two groups on such practices. Data from a survey sent to all Portuguese institutions show that, to some extent, the perspectives of quality as culture and quality as compliance seem to permeate both groups’ views. This is evident in regard to the factors identified as supporting the development of internal QA, the main features underlying the implementation of such practices and their main effects. As the study allows for a better understanding on how these practices are perceived by teaching and non-teaching staff, it can contribute to promoting the critical reflection of institutions about QA and the way it can be both more effective and aligned with academia’s needs and expectat...

This paper describes the teaching of psychological report writing at Karolinska Institutet and the efforts to improve it through the introduction of formative assessment applied as peer and teacher...

In the last 10–15 years, many institutions of higher education have switched from paper-and-pencil methods to online methods of administering student evaluations of teaching (SETs). One consequence...

In this paper, we have developed a classification model for online learning environments that relates the Instructors Overall Performance (IOP) rating (according to students’ perceptions) with the course characteristics, students’ demographics and the effectiveness of the instructor in his/her teaching roles. To that end, a comprehensive Student Evaluation of Teaching (SET) instrument is proposed, which includes not only conventional teaching elements, but also items that encourage twenty-first century skills. The goal of the study is twofold: (i) to quantify the extent to which the selected variables explain the IOP rating, and (ii) determine which teaching and non-teaching variables most affect the IOP rating. The best performing classifier achieved a competitive accuracy, highlighting that the selected variables mainly determine the IOP values. Other important findings include: (i) the IOP value is mainly influenced by the effectiveness of the instructor in his/her teaching roles; (ii) teaching...

This paper presents an analysis of the response of student satisfaction scores to online delivery for courses at a large Australian university. Taking data from 2653 courses delivered since 2011 we employ a difference-in-differences estimator approach to evaluate the impact of a transition from face-to-face learning to online learning of courses on student satisfaction. We estimate that, on a five-point scale, conversion to online learning lowers course satisfaction by about 0.2 points and instructor satisfaction by about 0.15 points. These correspond to shifts relative to the underlying distributions of about 25–30% of a standard deviation. Some implications of the (slight) relative unpopularity of online learning are discussed.

Self and peer-assessment are becoming central aspects of student-centred assessment processes in higher education. Despite increasing evidence that both forms of assessment are helpful for developing key capabilities in students, such as taking more responsibility for their own learning, developing a better understanding of the subject matter, assessment criteria and their own values and judgements, and developing critical reflection skills, both forms of assessment are still not the norm at universities. This paper provides the findings of a two-year study of formative self and peer-assessment at an Australian university. The study supports other research showing that students tend to regard formative self and peer-assessment as beneficial for gaining more insights about the assessment process and for improving their own work. We argue that self and peer-assessment requires careful design and implementation for it to be an effective tool for formative assessment processes; and that the developmen...

Using nine years of student evaluation of teaching (SET) data from a large US research university, we examine whether changes to the SET instrument have a substantial impact on overall instructor scores. Our study exploits four distinct natural experiments that arose when the SET instrument was changed. To maximise power, we compare the same course/instructor before and after each of the four changes occurred. We find that switching from in-class, paper course evaluations to online evaluations generates an average change of −0.14 points on a five-point scale, or 0.25 standard deviations (SDs) in the overall instructor ratings. Changing labelling of the scale and the wording of the overall instructor question generates another decrease in the average rating: −0.15 of a point (0.27 SDs). In contrast, extending the evaluation period to include the final examination and offering an incentive (early grade release) for completing the evaluations do not have a statistically significant effect on the over...