Background: Mid-semester evaluations are gaining traction as a means to gather evaluation data for formative purposes. However, it is not clear if course coordinators who conduct these evaluations are adequately equipped with evaluative knowledge and skills to guide them through their evaluative processes. Objectives: This study is a…

Online assessment is defined as a systematic method of gathering information about a learner and learning processes to draw inferences about the learner's dispositions. Online assessments provide opportunities for meaningful feedback and interactive support for learners as well as possible influences on the engagement of learners and learning…

Innovation courses are needed in higher education to meet workforce demands and prepare students for societal challenges. Assessment of outcomes can be challenging in innovation courses, particularly those that leverage diversity to drive innovation. The authors report on assessment methods in one such course at a public university using the…

Surveys are typical for student evaluation of teaching (SET). Survey research consistently confirms the negative impacts of careless responses on research validity, including low data quality and invalid research inferences. SET literature seldom addresses if careless responses are present and how to improve. To improve evaluation practices and…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents a three part series on fixing assessments. In Part 1, David Eubanks advocates for a collaborative model of assessment as the field enters a fourth decade of low return on investment. In Part 2, Megan R. Good laments the opportunity cost of continuing the define-measure-improve assessment model…

Self and peer assessments have been identified as effective strategies to develop a deeper understanding of complex concepts, enhance meta-cognitive capacity, and support learner self-efficacy. This study examines data related to peer and self-assessment exercises completed within a university engineering programme (n=61). Data related to…

The cry that today's higher education students are particularly individualist is a commonly-heard one. In England, the considerable personal cost of tuition is often blamed for creating a series of negative student traits, including consumerism (an idea that one has bought the right to a degree) and individualism (a sense of the individual as the…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents a three part series on fixing assessments. Assessment means different things, but it almost always includes accreditation reporting. In Part 1: David Eubanks describes what went wrong with the accreditation standards on learning assessment and the compliance culture that they created. This…

In this work, the authors document an expansion of the Public Speaking Competency Rubric (PSCR). First developed in 2012 by Schreiber, et al., the original rubric has only one item related to non-verbal communication. The authors of this work expanded the rubric to include 10 items related to the non-verbal aspects of public speaking and had it…

Rater comments tend to be qualitatively analyzed to indicate raters' application of rating scales. This study applied natural language processing (NLP) techniques to quantify meaningful, behavioral information from a corpus of rater comments and triangulated that information with a many-facet Rasch measurement (MFRM) analysis of rater scores. The…

Past research has shown that assessments of engineering students' transferable skills have not been properly investigated or incorporated into the practices of higher education institutions. This study addressed this gap by proposing a System for Assessing Engineering Students' Transferable Skills (SACTEE, in Portuguese), which includes scales for…

We argue that assessment and feedback practices in higher education need to be transformed to better address three purposes: "promoting" learning, "assuring" assessment rigour, and "communicating" students' employability. To address shortcomings in the current assessment and feedback culture, we propose programmatic…

This issue of "Assessment Update" presents a three part series on fixing assessments. In Part 1: "Assessment Standards are Broken," David Eubanks highlights the challenges with the assessment standards articulated by institutional accreditors. In this article, Part 2: Megan R. Good, discusses the opportunity costs faced and…

Within the context of Chinese university education, effective communication in the field of second language writing heavily relies on lexical complexity, yet the role of writing feedback perception in relation to lexical complexity remains elusive. This study introduces a comprehensive writing feedback perception model encompassing perceptions of…

This study mainly explored the effects of teacher feedback, peer feedback and automated feedback on the use of metacognitive strategies in EFL writing. Ninety-seven participants were recruited and divided into three groups, who received two months of feedback from teachers, peers and an automatic writing evaluation system, respectively, and then…