Taught postgraduate students are a unique group, undergoing a short, intensive period of study. Many taught postgraduate students are international, engaging for the first time with new learning approaches, including Personal Development Planning (PDP). This article provides analysis of the views of international taught postgraduates about the…

There are many pressures on academics to "satisfy" students' needs for feedback, not least the inclusion of questions about feedback. Many have commentated on the lack of student engagement with summative feedback while most believe that feedback is necessary to improve individual student performance. Several have looked at a range…

Educators and researchers are increasingly calling for the processes of writing and knowledge construction to be an integral part of disciplinary learning. This article contributes to the literature by presenting an empirical analysis of a programme that was designed to expose students to the complexities of academic practices in conjunction with…

Although feedback has a great potential for learning, students do not always make use of this potential. This article therefore reviews research literature on students' use of feedback in higher education. This is done in order to find answers as to why some students do not use the feedback they receive and which factors are important in…

Assessment is acknowledged as a central motivator for learning, as being perhaps the most difficult and arduous task for tutors, and also, a defining component of institutional quality, curriculum, courses and degrees. Therefore, given this, surely our understanding of terms, processes and their relationships, which reveal our knowledge of…

One activity-rich way to utilize collaborative learning, team-based learning (TBL), can present students and teachers with both opportunities and challenges. TBL requires students to prepare for each class, where they are then assessed for their "readiness" to apply the concepts learned during their pre-class preparation. This study addresses two…

Assessment of oral presentation skills is an underexplored area. The study described here focuses on the agreement between professional assessment and self- and peer assessment of oral presentation skills and explores student perceptions about peer assessment. The study has the merit of paying attention to the inter-rater reliability of the…

This article describes the evaluation of an online study skills course unit designed, using evidence-based principles, to support undergraduate students. A mixed-methods approach was employed to establish the extent to which the unit was (a) fit for purpose and (b) effective. Data were obtained from an online survey (n = 63) conducted on entry to…

This study contributes to scant empirical investigation of peer critique of writing among heterogeneously grouped native and nonnative speakers of English, now commonplace in higher education. This mixed-methods study investigated the use of directed peer review to improve writing among graduate students, the majority of whom were nonnative…

The benefits of embedding the teaching of writing into the curriculum have been advocated by educators and researchers. However, there is currently little evidence of embedded writing instruction in the UK's higher education context. In this article, we present a case study in which we report the design, implementation and evaluation of an…

Despite increasing attention to the challenges of supervising international doctoral students, little research has been conducted to examine supervisory feedback practice with international students and its impact on the thesis writing process. This exploratory qualitative study seeks to fill the gap and contribute to understanding the feedback…

Assessment feedback continues to be a relatively under-researched area in higher education despite its fundamental role in learning and teaching. This article positions assessment feedback as a complex meaning-making process requiring dialogue and interpretation.The article outlines an evaluative case study investigating a feedback review meeting…

This article discusses issues relating to the effectiveness of feedback and the student perspective. The study described provides rich data relating to student perceptions of useful feedback, their perceptions of feedback cues and their feelings about the importance of feedback relationships in the process. The outcomes suggest that written…

Assessment is critically important to education both for accreditation and to support learning. Yet the literature dealing with formative and summative assessment definitions and terminology is not aligned. This article reports an empirical small-scale study of lecturers in Education at an English university. The research posits that these…

The use of lectures is ubiquitous in higher-education institutions, but also heavily criticized from an andragogical viewpoint. A current challenge for lecturers is to provide opportunities for active learning during these sessions and to evaluate their impact on student experience. Three one-minute interventions based on the lecture materials…