Assessing group work formatively in higher education poses a significant challenge. The complexity of evaluating individual contributions is compounded by the lack of efficient and effective methods for tracking, analysing and assessing individual engagement and contributions, which can impede timely feedback and the development of group work…

This paper considers utilising the sociocultural concept of learning activity to understand parents' learning about young children's play in the context of community playgroups and social media use. Parents' knowledge about children's play influences the provision of parental-provided play experiences for young children and can be enhanced through…

There has been extensive investigation into factors affecting digital technology integration in learning and teaching, but the complexity of integration continues to elude understanding. Thus, questions about how digital technologies can be best used to support learning persist. This paper argues that methods designed to address complex systems…

To encourage increased student attendance and engagement in a third-year economics unit, the curriculum was redesigned to incorporate continuous assessment throughout the semester. A component of group project marks were allocated to peer assessment, in an attempt to address concerns about free-riding colleagues sharing a common mark. This study…

The informal learning that older (age 50+) men experience in Australia has been the subject of a suite of recent, intensive, mixed methods research projects in community-based voluntary organizations. The purpose of the research was to examine where men are learning in these contexts beyond work and formal education rather than to assume and…

Since independent study groups can be important in providing spaces for students in creative disciplines to develop a critically reflexive approach to their creative practice, tutors in an Australian university introduced independent group learning to students studying in creative disciplines. However, student responses to the experience of…

This paper reports on the social learning from a project aimed to increase the knowledge and capacity of a group of farmers in Tasmania, Australia, to reduce the impacts of intensive agriculture on soil health and waterways, and to optimise the efficient use of on-farm inputs. The plan-do-check-review cycle adopted in this project required the…

Purpose: Group-based tasks or assignments, if well designed, can yield benefits for student employability and other important attribute developments. However there is a fundamental problem when all members of the group receive the same mark and feedback. Disregarding the quality and level of individual contributions can seriously undermine many of…

An online group work project for off campus students, using wikis as the collaboration platform, has been conducted successfully for several years. Students were given the opportunity and technical means to collaborate, and staff could assess individual students' participation. However, the actual level of collaboration was less than hoped for,…

Beliefs about the validity and merit of self-, peer- and group-assessment practices are presented from 213 pre-service primary teachers and 30 staff who teach them. Both groups were surveyed using comparable items. A subset of seven staff participated in semi-structured interviews. Staff were far more supportive of peer- and self-assessment…

This article explores project-based cross-cultural and cross-institutional learning. Using Web 2.0 technologies, this project involved more than 240 students and eighteen academic staff from seven international universities. The focus of this article relates to a project-based learning activity named "The Gift". At each institution the…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to critically examine an assessment task, undertaken by pre-service science teachers, that integrates the use of technology (in this case digital video-recorders and video-editing software) whilst scaffolding skill development. The embedding of technology into the assessment task is purposeful, aiming to…

The increased use of group work in teaching and learning has seen an increased need for knowledge about assessment of group work. This report considers exploratory research where the SOLO Taxonomy, previously used to analyse the quality of individual responses, is applied to group responses. The responses were created as part of an activity…