Developing assessment and feedback strategies to assist students with progression and graduation is a key focus for many higher education institutions. However, student engagement with feedback is often poor and they can find it difficult to act upon; often stating the feedback is generic or of insufficient quality for improvement. Here, I present…

In spite of the rising tide of metrics in UK higher education, there has been scant attention paid to assessment loads, when evidence demonstrates that heavy demands lead to surface learning. Our study seeks to redress the situation by defining assessment loads and comparing them across research and teaching intensive universities. We clarify the…

The ITEEA's Council for Technology and Engineering Teacher Education (CTETE) Curriculum Committee solicited, collected, and analyzed several examples of international lesson plans to find out how various countries understand and/or apply the "Standards for Technological and Engineering Literacy: The Role of Technology and Engineering in STEM…

In this paper we explore the concept of the middle tier in education systems, outlining how it is a crucial element that links high-level education policy to the practices that are carried out in schools. Reflecting on the similarities and differences in the profiles of the middle tiers of the four nations of the United Kingdom (UK), we observe…

Purpose: This essay engages with scholarship on history as a discipline, curriculum documents and academic and public commentary on the teaching of history in Australian, British and Canadian secondary contexts to better understand the influence of the tension between political pressure and disciplinary practice that drives the history wars in…

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…

Providing evidence that can inform awarding is an important application of Comparative Judgement (CJ) methods in high-stakes qualifications. The process of marking scripts is not changed, but CJ methods can assist in the maintenance of standards from one series to another by informing decisions about where to place grade boundaries or cut scores.…

In Comparative Judgement (CJ) exercises, examiners are asked to look at a selection of candidate scripts (with marks removed) and order them in terms of which they believe display the best quality. By including scripts from different examination sessions, the results of these exercises can be used to help with maintaining standards. Results from…

Comparative Judgement (CJ) is an increasingly widely investigated method in assessment for creating a scale, for example of the quality of essays. One area that has attracted attention in CJ studies is the optimisation of the selection of pairs of objects for judgement. One approach is known as adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ). It has been…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to evaluate two coaching and mentoring programmes focused on the ever-increasingly important aim of enhancing the chances of professional level employment for undergraduate students, at two UK universities. In addition, to offer recommendations to enhance coaching and mentoring success within higher education…

The use of adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ) for assessment in technology education has been topical since its introduction to the field through the e-scape project coordinated by the Technology Education Research Unit in the United Kingdom. In the last decade, however, there has been an increasing volume of research examining how ACJ can and…

This narrative literature review evaluates the effectiveness of synthetic phonics in comparison with analytic phonics. It presents the key research findings and offers a critical appraisal of this research. Primary schools have developed a variety of assessment processes which assess pupils' knowledge and skills in synthetic phonics. It is through…

We report on a mixed-method study that compared students' perceptions of summative assessment across two distinct disciplines--education and mathematics, at two research-intensive institutions in the UK. The disciplines chosen represent opposing positions in Biglan's classification of academic disciplines, as well as having very different…

The creation of the Teaching Excellence Framework (TEF) represents a significant development concerning the teaching mission of the university in the UK. This paper considers the background to, and the development of, the TEF. It explains the context from which the TEF emerged and unpacks a series of rationales which illustrate the need for, and…

Student learning outcomes assessment examines whether programs cover the material stated in their learning goals, whether students are learning the material, and the impact on student retention, graduation, post-graduation outcomes, and institutional accreditation, with the aim of providing faculty with data that can be used to help programs…