Various forms of proofreading of student writing take place in university contexts. Sometimes writers pay freelance proofreaders to edit their texts before submission for assessment; sometimes more informal arrangements take place, where friends, family, or coursemates proofread. Such arrangements raise ethical questions for universities…

This article is the first to examine the use of screen-capture video feedback on student assignments on a social science degree at a British university. It is based on qualitative, focus group, research with students who received one or more video recordings on their academic work over the period 2019-2021. The article first places video feedback…

Studies into the efficacy of teacher development courses for early career academics point to graduates conceiving of their teaching in increasingly complex and student-focussed ways. These studies have used pre- and post-testing of conceptions of teaching to identify this finding. However, these studies do not identify what aspects of these…

Strong arguments have been forwarded for embedding academic writing development into the UK higher education curriculum and for subject tutors to facilitate this development (Hyland, 2000; Lea & Street, 2006; Monroe, 2003; Wingate, 2006). This small-scale case study explores subject tutors' practices and beliefs with regard to the provision of…

This paper explores the potential of technology to enhance the assessment and feedback process for both staff and students. The "Making Connections" project aimed to better understand the connections that students make between the feedback that they receive and future assignments, and explored whether technology can help them in this…

Over the last decade, the pedagogical approach known as mathematical modeling has received increased interest in college algebra classes in the United States. Math modeling assignments ask students to develop their own problem-solving tools to address non-routine, realistic scenarios. The open-ended quality of modeling activities creates dilemmas…

Establishing a link between Course Learning Outcomes (LOs) and Program Outcomes (POs) while assessing the course contents and delivery are among the most challenging issues in Higher Education. In the present study two forms were generated based on specific Course Learning Outcomes identified in the syllabus at the beginning of the teaching term:…

This article, using a student outcomes definition of academic standards, reports on academics' sense of standards as enacted through marking practices. Twelve lecturers from two UK universities were asked to "think aloud" as they graded written assignments followed by a semi-structured interview. The interview data were used to…

Peer assessment of long written tasks poses particular problems as these tasks typically involve complex learning and solving ill-structured problems which require divergent responses. Marking reliability of this kind of writing task is difficult to achieve. The author illustrates this through an evaluation of two implementations of peer…

This article seeks to illuminate the gap between UK policy and practice in relation to the use of criteria for allocating grades. It critiques criterion-referenced grading from three perspectives. Twelve lecturers from two universities were asked to "think aloud" as they graded two written assignments. The study found that assessors made…

Since 2006 (with the exception of 2013), the "Student Academic Experience Survey" has been designed and developed in partnership between the Higher Education Policy Institute and the Higher Education Academy (HEPI-HEA). The Survey has become one of the major surveys within the UK higher education landscape, providing insight into how…

The lived experience of academic teachers as they engage in feedback has received relatively little attention compared to student perspectives on feedback. The present study used an ethnographically informed methodology to investigate the everyday practices around undergraduates' writing of fourteen UK HE teachers, in a range of disciplines and…

Feedback is a key element in effective teaching and learning. The issue of how teachers perceive the role of feedback will impact significantly their feedback approaches, the amount of the detail of their feedback and the time and effort expended on the feedback provision. This research was designed with the purpose of exploring how a group of…

This small scale action research study investigated the experiences of learners over two iterations as they completed a patchwork text assignment within the digital medium of a personal learning system (PLS). The aim was to investigate the extent to which using a PLS can facilitate formative and collaborative feedback to assist student learning. A…

With the increasing levels of access to higher education in the United Kingdom, larger class sizes make it unrealistic for tutors to be expected to identify instances of peer-to-peer plagiarism by eye and so automated solutions to the problem are required. This document details a novel algorithm for comparison of suspect documents at a sentence…