Evaluating the impact of Academic Literacies teaching (Lea and Street [1998. "Student Writing in Higher Education: An Academic Literacies Approach." "Studies in Higher Education" 23 (2): 157-72. doi:10.1080/03075079812331380364]) is difficult, as it involves gauging whether writers: (1) gain better understanding of what…

Background: Group-based parent programmes demonstrate positive benefits for adult and child mental health, and child behaviour outcomes. Greater fidelity to the programme delivery model equates to better outcomes for families attending, however, fidelity is typically self-monitored using programme specific checklists. Self-completed measures are…

Many high-stakes examinations in the United Kingdom (UK) use both constructed-response items and selected-response items. We need to evaluate the inter-rater reliability for constructed-response items that are scored by humans. While there are a variety of methods for evaluating rater consistency across ratings in the psychometric literature, we…

The closed-door PhD and doctoral viva voce--the approach adopted in the United Kingdom--is esteemed by some as being a valuable academic tradition. However, an increasing body of literature and research has raised concerns about the quality, transparency, reliability and validity of this viva format. This systematic literature review aims to…

We developed a brief, informant-report interview for assessing autism spectrum conditions (ASC) in adults, called the Developmental, Dimensional and Diagnostic Interview-Adult Version (3Di-Adult); and completed a preliminary evaluation. Informant reports were collected for participants with ASC (n = 39), a non-clinical comparison group (n = 29)…

Purpose: This study is aimed to identify the high-frequency vocabulary (HFV), otherwise termed "core vocabulary" for adults with complex communication needs. Method: Three major characteristics of the HFV--a relatively small number of different words (NDW), a relatively high word frequency, and a high word commonality across…

Research project modules are a key part of UK undergraduate and postgraduate bioscience degree programmes. Report marking invariably uses two assessors, but marking models are mixed with some institutions using two independent markers and others using the project supervisor as one of the assessors. This latter model is controversial with critics…

Autistic adults who have a history of committing crimes present a major problem for providers of services in terms of legal disposal options and possible interventions, and greater understanding of this group and their associated needs is required. For this reason, we aimed to investigate the face validity of a proposed sub-typology of autistic…

Moderation is put forward as they key strategy for improving the reliability of teacher assessment. However, for many teachers the word "moderation" conjures up ideas of uncomfortable situations in which marking is being checked by others and there are prolonged arguments about tiny features of individual work. In this article, the…

For a number of reasons, increasing reliance is being placed on teacher assessment in high-stakes contexts in many countries around the world. Simultaneously, countries that have for some time relied to greater or lesser degrees on teacher assessment for high-stakes purposes are in the process of questioning the validity of that reliance. In…

The United Kingdom's (UK's) Research Excellence Framework of 2014 was an expensive high stakes evaluation which had a range of impacts on higher education institutions across the country. One component was an assessment of the quality of research outputs where a major feature was a series of panels organised to read and rate the outputs of their…

Background: The Dysarthria-in-Interaction Profile's potential contribution to the clinical assessment of dysarthria-in-conversation has been outlined in the literature, but its consistency of use across different users has yet to be reported. Aims: To establish the level of consistency across raters on four different interaction categories. That…

Health professions education has undergone radical changes over the past 100 years. This has necessitated a shift away from education programmes largely focused on testing knowledge and skills using predominantly written examinations. There has been a shift towards programmes which are intentionally designed with the end product in mind, a…

The aim of the study was to investigate how raters come to their decisions when judging spoken vocabulary. Segmental rating was introduced to quantify raters' decision-making process. It is hoped that this simulated study brings fresh insight to future methodological considerations with spoken data. Twenty trainee raters assessed five Chinese…

Systematic reviews of literature are studies that strategically search for published research on a specific topic in order to synthesize what is known about the topic. This systematic review describes 157 articles on synchronous online learning (SOL) from thirty-four different countries on instructional setting, content areas, participant…