Processes for moderating assessments are much debated in higher education. The myriad approaches to the task vary in their demands on staff time and expertise, and also in how valid, reliable and fair to students they appear. Medical education, with its diverse range of assessments and assessors across clinical and academic domains presents…

Conventionally, quantitative surveys are used for student evaluations in higher education, but the validity of this practice has been questioned. In the present study, we investigated a qualitative method for evaluating a bachelor's programme. Forty-one first-year students and twenty-eight third-year students on a bachelor's programme in Public…

Driven by issues of accountability, the assessment movement in higher education has gained significant momentum in recent years. However, successful implementation of assessment processes varies radically across institutions. A key issue is faculty engagement. This qualitative inquiry explored factors that impact faculty participation in a…

Formative assessment is increasingly being implemented through policy initiatives in Chinese educational contexts. As an approach to assessment, formative assessment derives many of its key principles from Western contexts, notably through the work of scholars in the UK, the USA and Australia. The question for this paper is the ways that formative…

The use of e-assessment in higher education is a relatively new educational practice that has been more frequently studied in recent years. This review aims to summarise some research on e-assessment, providing an overview based on articles from three well-established scientific journals. Focusing on research topics, settings for e-assessment and…

Collaborative learning is being used extensively by educators at all levels. Peer-led team learning in a version of collaborative learning that has shown consistent success in science, technology, engineering and mathematics disciplines. Using a multi-phase research study we describe the development of an observation instrument that can be used to…

This article uses the case of designing a new course questionnaire to discuss the issues of validity, reliability and diagnostic power in good questionnaire design. Validity is often not well addressed in course questionnaire design as there are no straightforward tests that can be applied to an individual instrument. The authors propose the…

The argument made in this essay is that it is necessary to theorize a form of assessment--the academic viva in higher education. It is threatened with extinction because of its high cost compared with written exams, multiple choice and other forms of assessment. However, little empirical research, both in Norway and internationally, has been…

This study explored the impact of individual versus two-person group testing on graduate students' achievement and motivation to learn while enrolled in a 16-lesson educational research methods course. Students in two sections of the course were exposed to the same content and instructional methods, with one exception: students in one section took…

Discusses the use of a student learning journal for collecting course effectiveness data at the University of Technology (Sydney, Australia). Qualitative data from the journals include students' developing perceptions of course content, structure, and activities over a period of time. Addresses issues regarding validity, confidentiality, and data…

Two frameworks for educational assessment distinguished, which is quantitative, adequate for construing some kinds of learning, and qualitative, which is more appropriate for most objectives in higher education. The paper argues that institutions implicitly encourage quantitative assessment, thus encouraging a surface approach to learning although…