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…

A crucial determinant of the success or failure of collaborative group work is the effect of peer feedback interventions on learning. Research exploring such effects on developing soft skills is sparse. This study seeks to address whether peer feedback leads to enhanced teamwork behaviour and self-assessment ability, two skills highly sought after…

The accuracy and consistency of peer marking, particularly when students have the power to reward (or penalise) during formative and summative assessment regimes, is largely unknown. The objective of this study is to evaluate students' ability and behaviour in marking their peers' teamwork performance in a collaborative group assessment context…

It has been suggested for many years that students who are able to judge their own performance should do well in academic assessments. Despite the increasing number of empirical studies investigating the effect of self-assessment on academic performance, there has not been a recent synthesis of findings in the higher education context. The current…

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…

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…

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…

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is a feature of university courses, both in professional areas, where it is commonplace, but also across many different disciplines. Assessment of WIL can be complex as it involves parties and settings external to the university, and it can be problematic because of difficulties in aligning learning activities during…

Despite an increasing focus on assessment feedback, educators continue to find that simply replicating an effective feedback practice from one context does not guarantee success in the next. There is a growing recognition that the contextual factors surrounding successful practices need to be considered. This article reports on a large-scale mixed…

In recent years, there have been calls in the literature for the dominant model of feedback to shift away from the transmission of comments from marker to student, towards a more dialogic focus on student engagement and the impact of feedback on student learning. In the present study, we sought to gain insight into the extent to which such a shift…

Assessment in higher education is commonly held to contribute to feedback to students on their learning and the certification of their achievement. This paper argues that this short-term focus must be balanced against a longer-term emphasis for learning-oriented assessment to foster future learning after graduation. The paper proposes that…

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…

The comparison of student-generated marks with those generated by teachers is discussed. Studies including such comparisons in the context of higher education courses are reviewed. Methodological issues in studies of this type are discussed and recommendations concerning the analysis are offered. (Author/MLW)

Quantitative self-assessment studies that compared self-evaluations and teacher marks/grades were subjected to meta-analysis. Results of a meta-analysis of 51 studies are summarized. It is suggested that researchers should attend to both good design and to adequate reporting of self-assessment studies. (TJH)