Purpose: This paper aims to show how an Academic Literacies lens can contribute to a deeper understanding of writing for a professional doctorate (PD) by focusing both on the language of supervisors' written feedback and on student and supervisor perspectives on feedback throughout Year 1 (Y1). Design/methodology/approach: Firstly, written…

Debate about the defining features of 'doctorateness' or what examiners look for in a PhD thesis is on-going, but hardly any attention has been paid in related literature to Postgraduate Researchers' (PGRs) perceptions of the key attributes that make a PhD thesis excellent. In this study we examine the state of play of the former to then go on to…

Both of us were drawn into the writing assessment field initially through our lived experiences as schoolteachers. We worked in radically different contexts -- Martin was head of a languages department and teacher of French and German in the late 1990s in the UK, and David was a Grade 12 teacher of Academic English in Alberta, Canada, at the turn…

Evaluating the impact of Academic Literacies teaching (Lea and Street [1998. "Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach." "Studies in Higher Education" 23 (2): 157-72. doi:10.1080/03075079812331380364]) is difficult, as it involves gauging whether writers: (1) gain better understanding of what…

Purpose: This study examines the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), particularly ChatGPT, on higher education (HE). The ease with which content can be generated using GenAI has raised concerns across academia regarding its role in academic contexts, particularly regarding summative assessments. This research makes a unique…

In this article, I think with trains to reflect about education, its rhythms, trajectories, and the possibilities that "attentive looking through windows" can afford us in moving toward just futures. Using two of Alfonsina Storni's poems, the yellow train of "Cien años de soledad" as well as educational philosophy, I argue that…

This paper reports on a three-year action research project action investigating the relationship between assessment as a social structure and the agency of students within a preparatory course for postgraduate international students at a UK Russell Group University. Action research into academic writing assessment within this highly constrained…

One of the missions of language education internationally is to enable students to use language in a context-appropriate manner. Against this backdrop, students' ability to linguistically encode formality emerges as an important issue. Using extracts of writing produced by 16-year-old students in 2004 and 2014, this study sought to investigate…

L2 student writers in UK universities often seek the services of a 'proofreader' before submitting work for assessment, and the proliferation of freelance proofreaders and online proofreading agencies has led to debates about the ethics of the proofreading of student writing in publications such as "Times Higher Education". This study…

"OpenEssayist" is an automated writing evaluation system (AWE) designed to provide immediate textual and graphical feedback to students to help them improve their academic writing. One of the graphical visualisations as part of "OpenEssayist," (named a 'rainbow diagram'), illustrates how well the key concepts within the writing…

In January 2023, UCAS announced their intention to reform the personal statement to a series of short questions. This built upon UCAS's work with students and providers in 2022/23, as well as academic literature that has documented the challenges and inequalities that surround the personal statement, including the Higher Education Policy Institute…

The lament that "students can't write" remains loud and defiant, even after years of research pointing to the myriad factors that make students' writing challenging, particularly when they move into university. This paper reports on a longitudinal, ethnographic study which explored students' writing "in transition," from…

This report sets out the findings of the technical development work completed as part of the Use Cases for Generative AI in Education project, commissioned by the Department for Education (DfE) in September 2023. It has been published alongside the User Research Report, which sets out the findings from the ongoing user engagement activity…

This article is a critique of current approaches to the teaching and assessment of writing in schools in the UK. Successive government initiatives, most particularly the latest (impoverished) version of the English curriculum, are seen as having led to a situation in which pupils are taught in a way that does not improve the quality of their…

There are increasing calls for the UCAS personal statement to be reformed. These calls are based on the claim that the current personal statement gives unfair advantages to more privileged applicants within higher education admissions. While this topic has attracted political attention, there is much about the personal statement that remains…