Search

In this conceptual article, we discuss the idea of students' epistemic agency as an overlooked link between assessment, knowledge and society. We transcend the contemporary discourses around assessment that focus on its authenticity and student-centredness and instead investigate assessment from the viewpoints of knowledge and knowing. This approach sees assessment as functioning not only as a promoter of student learning but also as a means to prepare students to be responsible graduates and citizens as epistemic agents. First, we adapt the theory of epistemic agency--that is, students' capability to agentically evaluate, produce, use and transform knowledge--by situating it within the specific context of assessment. Second, we suggest practice-oriented ideas for assessment and feedback design to nurture epistemic agency. Overall, we do not depict epistemic agency as yet another 'soft skill' in higher education but as a necessary focal point for assessment that aims to nurture a transformative relationship between students and knowledge. We suggest epistemic agency as a powerful concept in understanding and nurturing the three-way engagement between assessment, knowledge and society. This concept allows us to understand whether and how assessment shapes students as epistemic agents.

In university mathematics education, students do not simply learn mathematics but are shaped and shape themselves into someone new - mathematicians. In this study, we focus on the becoming of "dis"abled mathematical subjects. We explore the importance of abilities in the processes of being and becoming in university mathematics. Our interest lies in how teaching and assessment practices provide students with ways to understand themselves as both able and "dis"abled, as "dis"abilities are only understood with respect to the norm. We analyse narratives of nine university students diagnosed with learning disabilities or mental health issues to investigate how their subjectivity is constituted in discourse. Our analysis shows how the students are shaped and shape themselves as "dis"abled mathematicians in relation to "speed" in mathematical activities, "disaffection" in mathematics, "individualism" in performing mathematics, and "measurability" of performance. These findings cast light on the ableist underpinnings of the teaching and assessment practices in university mathematics education. We contend that mathematical ableism forms a watershed for belonging in mathematics learning practices, constituting rather narrow, "normal" ways of being "mathematically able". We also discuss how our participants challenge and widen the idea of an "able" mathematics student. We pave the way for more inclusive futures of mathematics education by suggesting that rather than understanding the "dis" in disability negatively, the university mathematics education communities may use dis by disrupting order. Perhaps, we ask, if university mathematics fails to enable accessible learning experiences for students who care about mathematics, these practices should indeed be disrupted.

Universities can prepare students for work, and universities can educate increasingly diverse student cohorts, but can they do both concurrently? This question of whether universities can offer equitable and inclusive careers education is increasingly under scrutiny. In this study, we address the largely under-theorised area of work-based placements from the perspective of career identity formation for diverse students. We do so through the adoption of Meijers and Lengelle's theorisation of 'career stories' which position the narrative as the mechanism to understand how students' have developed their career identities and future professional goals. Drawing on longitudinal interviews with disabled students, we explore university placements as 'boundary experiences' which can either enable, or disable, the formation of students' professional selves. Our findings indicate a troubling amount of variability, and indeed, luck within the placement offering, often unsupported by intentional pedagogical design. This suggests that the current university placement experience does little to support the professional identity formation processes of diverse students. Through this study, we further translate a processual learning theory from career learning to support future intentional pedagogical placement design in the university context for diverse students. The article ends with a consideration of how placement experiences can better align to equity goals of the university, and provide scalable, high-quality learning experiences for "all" students.

Students' emotions have been increasingly examined in feedback research. Socioculturally positioned research has particularly noted that emotions do not exist in a vacuum but are contextually situated, which also holds true for feedback encounters. In this scoping review, we provide a synthesis of earlier studies on emotions in feedback in higher education (2003-2023, 46 studies). First, we outline the research designs and methods. Second, we analyse the contextual influences on students' emotions in feedback. We used Bronfenbrenner's ecological theory as our guiding framework. The findings reveal that self-report methods have been widely utilized. Most studies have investigated emotions either on an individualistic or at the microsystem level, while only a few have considered the wider influence of the macrosystem and chronosystem levels. Future research must consider the macrosystem since emotions are historically, culturally and politically embedded in social interactions. Scholars must take into account the chronosystem level since emotions are dynamic, evolve over time and reflect wider societal changes.

When students enter higher education, they not only start learning and studying but begin a journey of becoming someone new in relation to themselves and to society. Scholarly research has increasingly emphasised this transformative element of higher education yet, to date, the role of assessment has received little attention in the processes of being and becoming. This is a crucial limitation given how profoundly assessment - exams, self- and peer-assessment, grades, rankings, metrics - characterises contemporary higher education. In this conceptual study, we propose a novel way of rethinking assessment as a matter of being and becoming. We bring together the separate fields of research on assessment and the philosophy of higher education by theorising other-formation and self-formation in and through assessment encounters. First, we discuss how assessment shapes students in 'the measured university' ("other-formation"). We then reconceptualise assessment from the viewpoint of how it promotes student agency and self-reflexivity ("self-formation"). Finally, we discuss some frequently used assessment practices in light of student self/other-formation. Our study sets the agenda of understanding student formation in and through assessment by laying the philosophical foundation for future studies.

How could assessment inclusively consider the diversity of students? In higher education, the most common answer is: through individual assessment accommodations. Inclusive assessment design has also been promoted to foster accessibility for all students. However, both of these approaches have largely drawn on the procedural understanding of 'inclusion' as 'enhanced academic outcomes'. In this conceptual study, a critical, socio-political approach to inclusive assessment is taken instead, considering assessment in its wider context of academic ableism. The rationale for Assessment for Inclusion (AfI) is formulated to harness assessment to promote the inclusion of marginalised students as fully accepted, agentic members of academic communities. Five practical principles for promoting AfI are introduced: rethinking accommodations, anti-ableist work, celebration of human diversity, student partnership, and interdependence. This study suggests that if mass higher education truly wishes to include students from increasingly diverse backgrounds, assessment needs to be rethought from the viewpoint of inclusion.

Assessment is often used to promote learning, but the mechanisms of how assessment relates to epistemology -- knowledge and knowing -- have been scarcely studied and theorised. In this study, we examine students' epistemic resources in relation assessment in the context of university mathematics education. We draw on the theoretical framework of epistemic injustice in order to understand how assessment produces knowledge and knowers. Using reflexive thematic analysis, we analyse 77 students' essays about their experiences and ideals of assessment practices. We discuss how the students contributed to co-constructing the dominant status of exams in mathematics -- exams were deemed fit to assess mathematical knowledge. At the same time, experiences of alternative assessment practices enabled students to re-define what constitutes valid knowledge and how such knowledge can be demonstrated and assessed. We conclude by noting that developing student-centred assessment practices not only fosters students' learning but also promotes their epistemic resources.

Assessment accommodations are used globally in higher education systems to ensure that students with disabilities can participate fairly in assessment. Even though assessment accommodations are supposed to promote access, not success, they are commonly portrayed as potentially being "cheating" in that they provide certain students with unfair advantages. This may lead students to avoid applying for accommodations for fear of being labelled 'cheaters'. Various security practices are often implemented within assessment accommodation processes to detect and prevent cheating and malingering. However, there remains a lack of theoretical understanding of the discursive interconnections between assessment accommodations and assessment security. In this study, we conduct a critical policy analysis to unpack how Canadian assessment accommodation policies have problematised assessment accommodations as a potential site for cheating. We show that Canadian universities use considerable resources to prevent cheating as accommodations are administered. In doing so, they portray students with disabilities as potential cheaters. We situate these policies in the wider societal context of the 'fear of the disability con', which perpetuates discrimination towards people with disabilities. We argue that assessment accommodation policies belong to the realm of assessment security rather than integrity and may thus fail to promote equity and inclusion.

Disabilities and neurodiversity are dominantly understood as something that challenges higher education rather than something that enriches it: ableist underpinnings characterize higher education despite policies of widened access. While earlier research has explored ideas such as 'inclusive pedagogies' and 'pedagogies of belonging', these important contributions have downplayed the marginalizing nature of pedagogy itself. In this conceptual study, we argue that non-ableist approaches to teaching are not sufficient in itself. We suggest a conceptual model for anti-ableist pedagogies to promote belonging and to challenge the exclusion and marginalization of disabled students. We have drawn on the ecological systems model by Bronfenbrenner to examine anti-ableist pedagogies as understood through the theory of systemic change. We provide a theory synthesis by drawing on earlier work on disability studies and anti-racist pedagogies: without systematic approaches to unpack and challenge the idea of a 'normal, able student' in pedagogical design and policies, 'pedagogies of belonging' fail to foster 'belonging' in a system that builds on exclusion. Our study will benefit both practitioners striving for more inclusive higher education as well as researchers aiming to better conceptualize the questions of belonging in the exclusive systems of higher education.

Systemic challenges for feedback practice are widely discussed in the research literature. The expanding mass higher education systems, for instance, seem to inhibit regular and sustained teacher-student interactions. The concept of "feedback literacy," representing students' and teachers' capacities to optimize the benefits of feedback opportunities, has gained widespread attention by offering new ways of tackling these challenges. This study involves a critical review of the first 49 published articles on feedback literacy. Drawing on science and technology studies, and in particular on Popkewitz's concept of fabrication, we explore how research has invented feedback literacy as a way of reframing feedback processes through the idea of individual skill development. First, we analyze how research has "fabricated" students and teachers through their feedback literacies that can be tracked, measured, and developed. Here, there exists a conceptual shift from analyzing feedback as external input to feedback literacy as a psychological construct residing within individuals. This interpretation carries positive implications of student and teacher empowerment, whilst downplaying policy-level challenges facing feedback interactions. The second contrasting fabrication positions feedback literate students and teachers as socio-culturally situated, communal agents. We conclude that feedback literacy is a powerful idea that, if used carefully, carries potential for reimagining feedback in higher education. It also, however, risks psychologizing students' and teachers' feedback behaviors amidst prevalent assessment and grading policies. We call for further reflexivity in considering whether feedback literacy research aims to challenge or complement the broader socio-political landscapes of higher education.

Many arguments for education's autonomy put forward a repeated yet undefined claim that there is an identifiable, dividing line between education and its outside, and that it is within the distinct contours of "the educational" where the nomos of its autonomy lies. Approaching this claim from a literary perspective, I conduct a critical reading of the language of education's autonomy that runs on the interplay between internal and external laws, and thus frames education's distinctiveness (or its indistinctiveness) as a question of governance. I claim that such emphasis on governance ties the discussion of education's autonomy to narratives of progress associated with occidental modernity and forms a self-generating feedback loop where self-governing education and self-governing human life serve as each other's arche and telos. As an alternative, antinomic figuration of education's autonomy, I offer a reading of a scene from Johan Amos Comenius's utopic novel "The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart" and pair it with Maurice Blanchot's writings on the neuter. While acknowledging that an ungovernable approach to education's autonomy poses challenges for educational thought, practice, and policy, I see that it nevertheless allows to question education's intelligibility and progress that governance assumedly guarantees.

This study examines the underlying mechanisms of ableism and disablism in the assessment of student learning in higher education. Globally, higher education institutions rely strongly on assessment accommodations (e.g., extra time in tests) to ensure disabled students' participation in assessment. This is also the case in Finland. Even though research on disabled students' experiences of assessment has repeatedly shown that both assessment and assessment accommodations cause barriers for disabled students' inclusion, critically oriented research on this topic has been scarce. In this study, the frameworks of ableism and disablism are used to unveil how assessment is predominantly designed for "the ideal, able student" and how disabled students are framed as "the Other" through assessment. This work is based on an analysis of 139 disabled students' experiences of assessment and assessment accommodations as collected through an open-ended, institution-wide survey at a Finnish university. The findings reveal the profound role of assessment in excluding and marginalizing disabled students as unfit to take part in the testing cultures of academia. The accommodation model is shown to hold disabled people responsible for their own exclusion. Disablism is identified in students' experiences of outright discrimination, such as teachers denying access to assessment accommodations when they are officially granted. This study offers a novel, critical means of discussing assessment from the viewpoints of diversity and inclusion. It also proposes future trajectories for anti-ableist assessment approaches that understand diversity as enriching, rather than obscuring, assessment.

Mathematics-specific learning difficulties and disabilities (MLD) have received increasing attention in scholarly research. In this study, we place MLD research in its wider context of risk societies by discussing the manufacturing of MLD as "a risk." This framing of MLD builds on a certain idea of "hope" in how research could provide the means to better understand and support learners with MLD. We conduct a Foucault-informed analysis to understand how scholarly knowledge about MLD has been produced through discourses of risk and hope. Our material consists of 30 influential journal articles published in the three fields of MLD research: cognitive sciences, special education and mathematics education. Our study indicates that MLD has been predominantly conceptualised through a technico-scientific risk discourse that frames MLD as harmful for learners and societies alike; such risk discourse relies on a discourse of hope in scientific methods. We also analyse a social risk discourse that identifies risks in social exclusion and marginalisation of students with MLD, finding hope in inclusive learning environments. Based on our analysis, we propose that the mere conceptualisation of MLD has thoroughly revolved around discourses of current liminalities ("risk") and enunciations of better futures ("hope"). However, what has been unexplored is the politics of such risk and hope discourses themselves. We propose a socio-politically oriented discourse of risk/hope as a way to reframe scientific knowledge production about MLD. This discourse identifies risks not in MLD itself but in how research manufactures MLD as a threat to both economic growth and student identities. Instead of asking research communities to mitigate the risk of MLD, we call for them to embrace it.

In scholarly research, disabilities are predominantly understood as something that obscures assessment rather than enriches it. In this study, I examine how research on assessment adjustments (e.g. extra time in tests and separate testing rooms) portrays disabled students. I discuss how this area of research plays a role in constructing an image of 'the ideal student' and its shadow, the 'non-ideal student'. I conduct a critical review to analyse how 26 assessment adjustment studies portray their object, disabled students, as being ontologically different from "normal" and "ideal" students. The 'disabled examinee' is portrayed as 'a spanner in the works' that endangers the objectivity of the assessment systems in higher education. Disabled students are framed as 'Others' who pose a danger for academic standards and integrity: assessment adjustments are thus seen as safeguarding academia from this danger. I argue that this portrayal contributes to marginalising disabled students in higher education.

Authentic assessment aligns higher education with the practices of students' future professions, which are increasingly digitally mediated. However, previous frameworks for authentic assessment appear not to explicitly address how authenticity intersects with a broader digital world. This critical scoping review describes how the digital has been designed into authentic assessment in the higher education literature. Our findings imply that the digital was most often used to enhance assessment design and to develop students' digital skills. Other purposes for designing the digital into assessment were less present. Only eight studies situated the students within the wider context of digital societies, and none of the studies addressed students' critical digital literacies. Thus, while there are pockets of good practice found within the literature, the vast majority of the studies employed the digital as an instrumental tool for garnering efficiencies. We suggest that in order to fit its purpose of preparing students for the digital world, the digital needs to be designed into authentic assessment in meaningful ways.

Assessment and feedback research constitutes its own 'silo' amidst the higher education research field. Theory has been cast as an important but absent aspect of higher education research. This may be a particular issue in empirical assessment research which often builds on the conceptualisation of assessment as objective measurement. So, how does theory feature in assessment and feedback research? We conduct a critical review of recent empirical articles (2020, N = 56) to understand how theory is engaged with in this field. We analyse the repertoire of theories and the mechanisms for putting these theories into practice. 21 studies drew explicitly on educational theory. Theories were most commonly used to explain and frame assessment. Critical theories were notably absent, and quantitative studies engaged with theory in a largely instrumental manner. We discuss the findings through the concept of reflexivity, conceptualising engagement with theory as a practice with both benefits and pitfalls. We therefore call for further reflexivity in the field of assessment and feedback research through deeper and interdisciplinary engagement with theories to avoid further siloing of the field.

Although an unprecedented number of autistic students are entering higher education, research focusing on their sense of belonging is scarce. Autistic students' sense of belonging can be jeopardized due to the students' encounters with a network of social expectations, activities, responses and biased attitudes. Using a participatory approach, our objective was to examine autistic university students' perceptions about their sense of belonging whilst at university. The study involved semi-structured interviews with 12 autistic university students and graduates from the Netherlands. Data were analysed using theory-guided content analysis and elaborative coding approaches. Findings indicate that autistic students' sense of belonging is multi-dimensional, fluid, and located within affective, spatial, temporal, social and political contexts. Our findings offer a novel and theoretically robust framework to conceptualise and further understand the sense of belonging. Important practical implications are also given.

This study outlines the assessment culture of mathematics in Finnish basic education (grades 6 and 9) based on a nationally-sampled dataset (N = 673). The study draws on the theoretical framework of assessment cultures as defined through cultures of learning, compliance and fear. We approach the assessment culture of mathematics through the student perspective. Students responded to a survey of how often summative and formative assessment practises were used in mathematics, and how useful they perceived them to be. A cluster analysis was conducted to understand the various student sub-groups on the basis of their perceptions of assessment. Overall, the results highlight the dominating role of exams as the backbone of mathematics assessment. Based on these findings, we conclude that in Finland, where assessment in basic education is mainly low-stakes, and where there are no national tests at this level, the assessment culture of mathematics largely represents a culture of "compliance."

E-assessment typically seeks to improve assessment designs through the use of innovative digital tools. However, the intersections between digital technologies and assessment can be seen as increasingly complex, particularly as the sociotechnical perspectives suggest assessment must be relevant to a digitally-mediated society. This paper presents an organising framework, which articulates this nuanced relationship between the digital and assessment design. It draws together literature from diverse domains, including educational technologies, assessment pedagogies and digital literacies. The framework describes three main purposes for designing the digital into assessment: 1) as a tool for improvement; 2) as a means to develop and credential digital literacies; and 3) as a means to develop and credential uniquely human capabilities. Within each purpose, it offers considerations for assessment and feedback design. In addition, it offers researchers analytical tools to understand the role of the digital in assessment. The framework seeks to connect assessment and feedback design to the digital world, and in so doing ensure that higher education will be relevant for graduates' digital futures.

When a Year 7 student physically reacted to a prompt of another student by anxiously drumming the desk with his ruler, exclaiming "uuuuhh", the initial thought of the observing researcher, Laura, was: "this is an interesting account". This started a reflective journey of first applying robust research methodologies to the episode the authors initially saw as a linear, logical system, then slowly developing understanding of the complexity of the interaction, as well as their position as complex observers of a complex entity. Thus, the journey evolved into a second-order complexity narrative (the complex entity being the first-order, the complex observer being the second order; Tsoukas & Hatch, 2001) that they tell here. In this article, the authors explain how exploring a complexity perspective helped them to make sense of a collaborative problem solving (CPS) situation that creates so much non-deterministic variation that it becomes irreducible to linear reasoning only. According to Bruner (1986), there are two modes of thinking: one that operates on logic to justify arguments and seek truths, and another that builds up a narrative and can inform about likely related accounts. The authors used both modes to analyse data that included the Year 7 student's reaction. They found out that seeing educational theories, as well as all the human and non-human agents involved as adding to the complexity of CPS research (Fenwick & Edwards, 2010) can provide tools to discuss intuitive interpretations and likely associations of what is present in the data.

The study investigated a developmentally sensitive group, emerging adults going through a critical post-secondary educational transition in tandem with the first wave of the COVID pandemic in Finland. The participants (n = 330) were surveyed initially during their first year in secondary education, and again during the pandemic, right after their graduation in summer 2020. According to latent change score models, there was a small mean level increase in anxiety but interestingly, the increase was stronger among individuals with fewer prior anxiety symptoms and fewer prior experiences of loneliness. However, during-pandemic experiences of social inclusion and living with parents were protective against an increase in anxiety symptoms. Findings from this longitudinal study add to the understanding of the complexity of the COVID impact on mental health and the intertwined dynamics of social relations and mental well-being among emerging adults.

We investigated how the transition to remote schooling during the COVID-19 pandemic affected the rates of bullying victimization among students in primary and lower secondary education and analyzed how a specific group of students, namely previously victimized students experienced remote schooling. The 2-month school lockdown offered a unique setting to explore the association between increasing Internet use and cyberbullying and reflect on the overlap between traditional bullying and cyberbullying in a new context. The main sample (n = 34 771) consisted of 10-16-year-old Finnish students who responded to an online survey during the remote schooling period in spring 2020. The sample was supplemented with data from two previous surveys conducted in the same schools in 2019 (n = 43,216) and in 2017 (n = 24,727). The prevalence of bullying victimization decreased substantially in all grade levels during the school lockdown. Physical isolation and surge in students' Internet use did not seem to lead to an increase in cyberbullying. Before-lockdown victimized students evaluated the time in remote schooling more positively than expected: they reported relatively high school liking and more teacher support than other students. The pre-existing gap in school adjustment between victimized and non-victimized students did not increase, but surprisingly, decreased. Our results highlight the notion that the main arena to fight bullying is within in-person interactions in schools.