Developing assessment and feedback strategies to assist students with progression and graduation is a key focus for many higher education institutions. However, student engagement with feedback is often poor and they can find it difficult to act upon; often stating the feedback is generic or of insufficient quality for improvement. Here, I present…

This paper explores student reported informal peer-learning in a business degree cohort at a UK community college. Literature on conceptualisation and debate regarding peer-learning is examined along with established typologies with respect to equality, mutuality and structure. Following this a critical review of evidence-based studies is…

Wikipedia has been viewed as a dubious resource within higher education, and students are often encouraged to avoid its use due to the questionable rigour of its entries. In this study the tables were turned when Wikipedia became the central element in an assessment task. The task experimented with a new approach to summative assessment within a…

The award of a PhD degree is based on a rigorous examination process which is unique in that examiners can recommend that the degree is awarded subject to minor or major amendments to the thesis. In their examiner reports, examiners also include formative feedback that is intended to help the doctoral researchers improve their work. Using data…

We compared the influence of open-book extended duration versus closed book time-limited format on reliability and validity of written assessments of pharmacology learning outcomes within our medical and dental courses. Our dental cohort undertake a mid-year test (30xfree-response short answer to a question, SAQ) and end-of-year paper (4xSAQ,…

While studies have extolled the value of using online rubrics, the benefits have usually been presented in terms of enhancing marking or delivery of teacher feedback. These benefits are welcome, but they nonetheless couch digital as simply an improved way for "old paradigm" transmission approaches to feedback that do little to help…

Attending higher education institutions and achieving academic success are associated with positive outcomes, valued at individual and societal levels, such as reducing unemployment and poverty and increasing civic participation. Thus, many studies have focused on enhancing learning by examining the factors that affect students' performance,…

The global shift to online teaching and learning in response to the pandemic was potentially deleterious to sense of belonging and connection to the institution. Food is important in all cultures and has multiple functions, including making connections and welcoming others, in addition to specific cultural and religious meanings. The Cultural Food…

This article documents the time taken to assess two different types of final year engineering courses -- a more traditional course in which the purpose of assessment is mostly to measure performance, and a second, that uses a multi-stage assessment process to implement an assessment for learning perspective. The research question is to determine…

Encouraging all students to meaningfully engage with feedback on summative assessments is a vexing challenge for educators (Watling, 2016). Using formative feedback techniques as a formal part of a summative assessment allows for a guaranteed 'feed forward'. Group crits in the form of students and staff viewing their own and others work in an…

There is debate about whether and how educational research has relevance for and is accessible to teaching practitioners. Much literature highlights the value of practitioner-based research approaches as a pathway to engaging teachers more readily with and in research, however, the practitioner research approach is often viewed negatively and is…

This article examines practice-based teaching methodologies found in the studio-based design critique ('crit'), and how they can be adapted to essay-based modules in the Humanities. Based on a small case study of a masters level module on film theory at a British university, the group crit was introduced as a mode of experiential learning in order…

Feedback may be considered 'good' according to many of the criteria in the literature whilst still having little or no impact on students' learning in the longer term. Feedback in the context of this paper is defined as the process of learners obtaining information about their work in order to produced improved learning. This comes from tutors,…

This work considers what can be gleaned from critically reflecting on several teaching philosophy statements to facilitate professional development. Specifically, three statements, written in 2015, 2019 and 2021 by the author, were investigated using qualitative reflexive thematic analysis to help identify static and dynamic themes within the…

The approach to, and the type of, assessment(s) that a Higher Education (HE) programme employs can be key factors in the effectiveness of assessment as a tool of learning. Peer assessment (PA) has the potential to develop the evaluative competence of students in HE. In the Republic of Ireland (RoI) there are three Institutes that each deliver a…