South Africa's new occupational and vocational qualifications require assessment centres with a national footprint to conduct national summative assessments which are convenient and cost effective for learners. This new assessment process requires specialised facilities, but few current facilities can provide these. The research project proposed a…

This study explored the use of video screencasts to supplement written feedback with a small cohort of early-career academics (n = 29) undertaking a postgraduate programme aligned to the UK Professional Standards Framework for teaching in higher education. The aims were to support the academics' professional development following their summative…

Feminist pedagogies have established the need to query power structures in terms of curriculum content and teaching praxis. However, the topic of student assessment poses difficulties: it is a means through which students' performance is evaluated and quantified according to set institutionalised criteria that values particular forms of hegemonic…

Nationally and internationally, universities are ranked in university league tables (ULTs). Sustained academic criticism of the rationale and methodology of compiling ULTs has not stopped these rankings exerting considerable pressure on the decisions of university managers. The compilation of ULTs is an inherently political act, with the choice…

Biodiversity-monitoring citizen science schemes provide valuable long-term monitoring data and benefit participants. There is increasing interest in engaging young people with nature. The British Trust for Ornithology's 'What's Under Your Feet?' project shows how schoolchildren can monitor soil invertebrates. Although individual projects like this…

The objectives of this article are to critically analyse the impact of formative and summative assessment in an informal secondary school environment. The informality reflects the work of The Anne Frank Trust UK and their practices in evaluating student progress through a two-week workshop programme. The preference for formative assessment is…

The report is a resource which provides a framework for school leaders and department heads to plan a coherent whole school approach to assessment that will support the learning of each and every student. The resource is also about focusing on the needs of students, the ways in which assessment can best support good pedagogy and practice and…

In aggressively neo-liberalized higher education systems and in 'high-performing' research units--typically academic schools in high-ranking research universities--research assessment has come to dominate the daily organization and enactment of research and research culture. So much so in fact that academics' research praxis, their employability,…

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…

Purpose: For speech-language pathologists (SLPs) working in schools, outcome measurement is an important element of practice, enabling us to evaluate the efficacy of our service provision and guiding future decision making, funding, and resource allocation. When selecting outcomes to measure, it is helpful to consider both the level at which…

Background: Educational outcomes in the United Kingdom vary as a function of students' family background, with those of lower socioeconomic status (SES) and certain ethnic minority groups among the worst affected. Aims: This pre-registered study investigates: (i) whether knowledge about students' socioeconomic and ethnic background influences…

The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on…

This paper explores student reported informal peer-learning in a business degree cohort at a UK community college. Literature on conceptualisation and debate regarding peer-learning is examined along with established typologies with respect to equality, mutuality and structure. Following this a critical review of evidence-based studies is…

This paper aims to offer an understanding of how (intersectional) bias in student evaluations of teaching affects academics' mental health and career progression. Despite the widespread acceptance of student evaluations, an emerging stream of research has begun to highlight the biases and prejudices that underpin much of data collection when it…

In this paper, we explore how diagram placement in mathematics textbooks influences (i) students' and teachers' perceptions of exposition quality and (ii) students' reading behaviour as indexed by their eye movements. Our findings contribute to research on the "spatial contiguity principle," which recommends that related educational…