Assessment has multiple purposes, one of which is to judge if students have met outcomes at the requisite level. Underperformance in assessment is frequently positioned as a problem of the student and attributed to student diversity and/or background characteristics. However, the assessment might also be inequitable and therefore exclude students…

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is proliferating in university courses across many countries. Like many educational practices, students' experience of it is shaped by the assessment processes adopted. Does assessment support or inhibit what WIL seeks to foster? To explore how students experience assessment in WIL, a small-scale investigation was…

While there is now extensive research on informal feedback seeking behaviour by employees in organisations, this literature has received limited attention in higher education. This paper addresses the gap between the two fields of feedback literacy and feedback seeking behaviour. Key organisational feedback seeking behaviour concepts including…

Portfolios are embraced extensively in higher professional education as effective tools for students to represent their learning and help prepare them for future practice. They are very diverse, used for both formative and summative purposes; however, concerns are raised that the current emphasis on academic standards and/or the focus on…

Universities have responded to the expansion of higher education and restructuring of the labour market by redesigning curriculum to better emphasise transferable skills and embed pedagogies that contribute to graduate employability. However, the ways in which universities judge and share achievement still provides poor evidence of what students…

Student feedback literacy denotes the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies. In this conceptual paper, student responses to feedback are reviewed and a number of barriers to student uptake of feedback are discussed. Four inter-related features are proposed…

This paper offers a critical and theoretical exploration of the contemporary use of standards in assessment in higher education. It outlines three discourses of assessment standards. Each perspective foregrounds particular realities and backgrounds others, and so influences practice in particular taken-for-granted ways. The assumptions of these…

Sustainable assessment has been proposed as an idea that focused on the contribution of assessment to learning beyond the timescale of a given course. It was identified as an assessment that meets the needs of the present in terms of the demands of formative and summative assessment, but which also prepares students to meet their own future…

Students' capacity for making evaluative judgements of their own work is widely acknowledged as central to their learning within programmes as well as being vital to their subsequent professional practice. In higher education literature, the act of evaluative judgement is usually portrayed as a process of deliberative, analytical reasoning…

Many professions have requirements for professional development activities to ensure continuing registration or membership. These commonly focus on participation in a limited range of activities. This paper questions the assumptions behind such approaches and what alternatives might be considered. It explores the suitability of metaphors used for…

Examines assessment issues in connection with peer learning at the college level and suggests ways in which the benefits of this approach can be maintained while still meeting a course's formal assessment requirements. Discusses the use of group assessment, peer feedback, self-assessment, assessment of participation, and negotiated assessment. (DB)

Use of student self-evaluation in grading is recommended, and several ways in which self-evaluation may be incorporated into the grading process are described, including grades justified and moderated by faculty and/or peers, criteria generated by peers, weighting, combining self-evaluation with demonstration of competence, and learning and grade…

A perspective on teaching and learning in higher education that regards the learner's experience as primary is outlined. Some propositions about learning from experience are made, a model of learning from experience is discussed, and implications for instructional design are examined. Major areas for curriculum development are identified.…