There are dissonances between educators' aspirations for assessment design and actual assessment implementation in higher education. Understanding how assessment is designed "on the ground" can assist in resolving this tension. Thirty-three Australian university educators from a mix of disciplines and institutions were interviewed. A…

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…

A wide range of technologies has been developed to enhance assessment, but adoption has been inconsistent. This is despite assessment being critical to student learning and certification. To understand why this is the case and how it can be addressed, we need to explore the perspectives of academics responsible for designing and implementing…

Achieving change in assessment practices in higher education is difficult. One of the reasons for this is resistance among those responsible for teaching and assessing. This paper seeks to explore this resistance through an analysis of staff dialogue during a major attempt to change the assessment practices at one institution. An institution-wide…

This paper describes an approach to assessment in which university students create a comprehensive and analytical summary, called the self-assessment schedule, of their learning in a given subject. The application of the schedule in postgraduate courses is discussed, and the views of staff and students are reported. (Author/GLR)