The effects of a private vs. group test setting were examined on a reading comprehension test for a sample of typical college students. Participants took Forms G and H of the Nelson Denny Reading Comprehension Test in both private and group (classroom) settings. Contrary to expectations, performance was slightly better in the group setting.…

Recently published evidence of limited learning among American college students confirms the damage done when students, faculty and institutions pursue interests that conflict with the educational process. The "disengagement compact" in which faculty tacitly trade lenient workloads and grading for higher student evaluation of teaching…

In higher education, assessment integrity is pivotal to student learning and satisfaction, and, therefore, a particularly important target of continuous quality improvement. This paper reports on the preliminary development and application of a process of recording and analysing current assessment moderation practices, with the aim of identifying…

This article focuses on the assessment procedures of Norwegian PhD theses as viewed by external members of evaluation committees from three countries with different examination systems; the USA, the UK and Sweden. Their viewpoints give useful information not only on the pros and cons with the Norwegian system, but also on the strengths and…

Academics teaching large and highly diverse classes are familiar with the inevitable effect this has on promulgating teaching and assessment practices to "middle of the distribution", thus ignoring the distribution extremes. Although the literature documents a wide range of strategies for supporting poor-performing students in large…

Innovative assessment practices have the potential to shift the way universities function. By focusing on well-designed assessment tasks, where students are expected to work collegially and are actively involved in self- and peer-assessment, the opportunity to engage students in the assessment process is realised. This article contends that…

Mastery of academic writing skills remains one of the greatest challenges for university students, especially in the first year. Amongst the reasons offered for the challenges are lack of clarity about the university's expectations and low levels of teacher feedback on work submitted, a failure to engage, and low levels of contact with teaching…

Portfolios are an established method of assessment, although concerns do exist around their validity for capabilities such as reflection and self-direction. This article describes an e-portfolio which closely aligns learning and reflection to graduate capabilities, incorporating features that address concerns about portfolios. Students are…

Group projects are recognised as effective means of engaging students with work-related skills and promoting cooperative learning. This paper reports findings of a small survey--a group project designed to reduce problems associated with the process of production of group goods and services: free-riding and monitoring participation level. The…

Programme evaluation is essential for quality assurance in education. In this paper, we describe our evaluation strategy for the first year of a new medical programme. Although we used multiple methods in the evaluation, the use of the focus group method was core. This paper reports our experiences of focus groups for this purpose. We describe the…

Peer assessment of long written tasks poses particular problems as these tasks typically involve complex learning and solving ill-structured problems which require divergent responses. Marking reliability of this kind of writing task is difficult to achieve. The author illustrates this through an evaluation of two implementations of peer…

The requirement to provide timely formative tasks that are designed to facilitate student learning and autonomy has provoked a wider examination of the role of assessment in higher education and encouraged further investigation of the alignment of learning, teaching and assessment in curriculum design frameworks. Many current authors have proposed…

Many tertiary-level courses assess students' participation in tutorial or online discussions. However, in educational and pedagogical research literature, criteria for assessing students' skills in engaging with peers remain unclear. This article describes an online assignment with a set of participation criteria and a method for assessing the…

This paper reviews the literature about peer and self-assessment in university courses from the point of view of their use, and the suitability of their use, in the first year of university study. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part argues that although first-year students are involved in many of the studies that report on the…

The curriculum for journalism is being forced to change because the traditional print-based and broadcast modes are being challenged by wide and easy access to online mass communication. Primarily, students need to develop proficiency in writing, editing and publishing. However, they are also expected to be skilled in the Web medium as they…