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…

Recently, the concept of evaluative judgement has gained attention as a pedagogical approach to classroom formative assessment practices. Evaluative judgement is the capacity to be able to judge the work of oneself and that of others, which implies developing knowledge about one's own assessment capability. A focus on evaluative judgement helps us…

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…

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…

Teaching a large class can present real challenges in design, management and standardisation of assessment practices. One of the main dilemmas for university teachers is how to implement effective formative assessment practices with accompanying high-quality feedback consistently over time with large classroom groups. This article reports on how…

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…

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…

Feedback is justified when it has a positive influence on students' subsequent performance. Opportunities for student action need therefore to be consciously designed if feedback is to influence learning. In this paper, we discuss how ipsative design of feedback processes, i.e. involving comparison of a student's current performance with a…

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…

Many current assessment practices are incompatible with the goals of independence, thoughtfulness and critical analysis; common forms of assessment are not consistent with the behavior of academics in their own contributions to knowledge; and the assessment policy of many departments undermines approaches to learning. (Author/MLW)

Sustainable assessment is a measure of the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed for lifelong learning. Higher education assessment should meet the needs of the course and prepare learners for assessing themselves. Formative assessment should use a criterion-based framework and separate feedback from grading. (SK)