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…

Student evaluations of courses and teaching (SETs) are used for various purposes, are omnipresent in academic teaching, and cause tensions within universities. Their analytical power is contested, and specific uses are problematised for negative effects on lecturers and academic relationships. This interpretive interview study addresses how…

Using rubrics can benefit the quality of assessment and learning. However, the conditions that stimulate or obstruct these benefits have been insufficiently studied. One underinvestigated claim is that rubrics are no substitution for good instruction and assessment and that teachers need training in utilising them. This is relevant since teachers…

The advantages and drawbacks of components of flexible assessment have been studied mostly from the standpoint of students and, to a lesser extent, teachers. A gap persists in understanding the collective perspectives of teachers and students concerning flexible assessment. This study aimed to explore experiences and perspectives of students and…

Low response rate and quality are common challenges when administrating student evaluations of teaching (SETs). This study aimed to increase SET response rate and quality by investigating a widely recommended strategy to overcome an underlying reason for students' non-responsiveness, namely the lack of transparency about SET processes. In Study 1,…

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are an influential -- and often sole -- tool in higher education to determine course and teacher effectiveness. It is therefore problematic that SET results are disturbed by low response rates and response quality. An important factor discussed in prior research to increase SET effectiveness and students'…

Feedback can be effective to student learning if the feedback practice meets several success criteria. It appears, however, that it is not easy to put insights from theory into practice. Using a cover sheet to provide structured feedback may provide a solution. Just how cover sheets influence feedback practice is, however, still largely unknown.…

As higher education quality assurance in many countries in Europe has become a mature activity, some agencies carrying out external quality assurance are developing beyond their core tasks and missions. The current study identifies new tasks taken up within quality assurance agencies and analyses the drivers behind such development. Based on an…

The increasing prominence of neoliberal agendas in international higher education has led to greater weight being ascribed to student satisfaction, and the national surveys through which students evaluate courses of study. In this article, we focus on the evaluation of feedback processes. Rather than the transmission of information from teacher to…

Assessment is critical in postsecondary education, as it is at all levels. Assessments are classified into four types: diagnostic, summative, evaluative, and formative. Recent trends in assessment have migrated away from summative to formative evaluations. Formative evaluations help students develop expertise and concentrate their schedules, ease…

Students are generally required to demonstrate diverse skills when writing their bachelor thesis. Accordingly, examiners are expected to consider all these skills when assessing the thesis, regularly with one overall grade. In this study, we examine which criteria of a rubric contribute most to the overall assessment. The study is performed…

Formative assessment can be seen as an integral part of teaching and learning, as formative assessment affects students' learning and vice versa. Students' motivation can theoretically be placed at the centre of this reciprocal relationship, as formative assessment is assumed to affect students' need satisfaction of autonomy, competence and…

In some institutions of higher learning, one of the approaches to successful governance is through student assessment of teachers, dubbed Student Assessment of Faculty or Student Evaluation of Teaching and extensively used in the United States of America (USA). In schools and colleges, the usual largest bloc and primary stakeholders are the…

Purpose: In the Netherlands, thesis assessment quality is a growing concern for the national accreditation organization due to increasing student numbers and supervisor workload. However, the accreditation framework lacks guidance on how to meet quality standards. This study aims to address these issues by sharing our experience, identifying…

Objective: In the past decade, several authors have advocated that formative assessment programmes have an impact on teachers' knowledge. Consequently, various requirements have been proposed in the literature for the design of these programmes. Only few studies, however, have focused on a direct comparison between programmes with respect to…