Feedback provided by peer reviewers plays a pivotal role in any journal peer-review model. Peer-review feedback helps authors reconsider their manuscripts in a new light and improve their work before it is published. While there is a wealth of knowledge and empirical evidence focusing on effective feedback practices in educational settings, there…

Authentic assessment aligns higher education with the practices of students' future professions, which are increasingly digitally mediated. However, previous frameworks for authentic assessment appear not to explicitly address how authenticity intersects with a broader digital world. This critical scoping review describes how the digital has been…

The analysis of exemplars of different quality is a potentially powerful tool in enabling students to understand assessment expectations and appreciate academic standards. Through a systematic review methodology, this paper synthesises exemplar-based research designs, exemplar implementation and the educational effects of exemplars. The review of…

Higher education student selection has significant societal, institutional and individual impacts. Thousands of applicants apply only for nursing, one of the major higher education disciplines. As the nursing profession is characterised by cognitive requirements, higher education institutions assess the learning skills of nursing applicants.…

Peer assessment in higher education has been studied for decades. Despite the substantial amount of research carried out, peer assessment has yet to make significant advances. This review identifies themes of recent research and highlights the challenges that have hampered its advance. Most of these challenges arise from the manual nature of peer…

A review of articles published in "Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education," over the last eight years (2006-2013) on assessment in higher education, since the introduction of the Bologna process, is the subject of the paper. The first part discusses the key issue of assessment in higher education and the method used for selecting…

The process of giving official acknowledgment to formal, informal and non-formal prior learning is commonly labelled as assessment, accreditation or recognition of prior learning (APL), representing a practice that is expanding in higher education in many countries. This paper focuses specifically on the assessment part of APL, which undoubtedly…

Group projects form a large and possibly growing component of the work undertaken for assessing students for postgraduate degrees in business. Yet the assessments sources, methods and purposes result in an array of combinations that the literature on assessment fails to capture in its full complexity. This paper builds on a new framework for…

Many Middle Eastern students in Western graduate programs in higher education wish to undertake evaluations of home country institutions, but their approaches reflect significant cultural differences. Issues confronting students and supervisors in this context are discussed, and a relatively recent "fourth generation" approach to…

The literature pertaining to evaluation of student work in groups is reviewed, and a number of group assessment methods are identified. Two alternative methods used at the University of Sunderland (England) are described. Issues and practical considerations in peer and self-evaluation of work in groups are also examined, particularly the tendency…

Asserts that the current assessment reform movement in statistics encourages instructors to think more broadly about cognitive measures that assess student learning and to incorporate authentic assessment, performance assessment, and portfolio assessment. Discusses areas to consider for assessment, problems with typical assessments, and…

Explores the issues that arise when development of personal attributes is identified as one of the goals of a new undergraduate medical program. Concludes that such personal learning should be assessed, but that the purpose should not be to certify competence but to harness the powerful effects of assessment onto an important aspect of practice…

Research evidence concerning the introduction of performance appraisal in United Kingdom universities is presented. The notion of "procedural compliance" is introduced to draw attention to the largely externally imposed appraisal of universities and to the nature of institutional response. Findings of a study of appraisal in four…

Reviews research on student-written evaluation of college teaching performance. Arguments against such evaluations as valid indicators of performance are examined, and various background characteristics thought to influence student ratings are considered. Student and faculty reaction to use of ratings is discussed, and suggestions are made for…

This article describes a project designed to ensure that class participation in a large introductory commercial law course is assessed fairly and reliably. The subjectivity often associated with this type of assessment is minimized by involving students in the specification of clear criteria and the assessment process as they were asked to assess…