Objective: The objective of this study was threefold: (a) to create a rubric for response complexity (RC), defined as an admixture of response length, grammatical diversity, categorisation, and sophistication; (b) to measure behavioural and cognitive engagement through students' written responses on a school-based written activity, and (c) to…

Since it became available free to the public in November of 2022, ChatGPT and other large-language model AIs have impacted the higher education classroom. Some fear that this is the end of essay-based assignments, as these are easily generated by ChatGPT. Principles of Genetics, an entry level genetics class, has previously incorporated a creative…

Academic entitlement formation will have adverse effects on both students and instructors, influence the teaching effectiveness and the learning experience, and threaten academic integrity and quality. Thus, it is crucial to know not only what factors may facilitate the development of academic entitlement, but also what strategies can be used to…

Increasing pressure is being placed on governments and legislators in different countries to take action against assignment outsourcing in higher education. Global discussions focus on prohibiting commercial outsourcing providers, such as contract cheating services. Despite evidence to suggest that outsourcing behaviours by students are…

With increasing calls for authentic assessment in higher education, the reference point for authenticity has been questioned. Typically, researchers define authenticity in relation to purposes of higher education, which are contested. Advancing the notion of educational authenticity rather than professional, societal, disciplinary, or…

Researchers have long cast grades as an unreliable proxy for student learning despite their enduring use in higher education. Grounding assessment instruments in student learning outcomes (SLOs) provides an accurate and accessible means of evaluating student performance and guiding instructional practice. Using a SLO-guided pretest/posttest…

This paper discusses a two-year study at an Australian university in which 154 undergraduate and 51 postgraduate students reflected on their experiences with flexible and personalised assessment where they could choose assessment tasks, submission dates and weightings of their assignments. Through pre- and post-course surveys and a focus group,…

Purpose: This study contributes to the current body of literature on students' understanding of academic misconduct, plagiarism, forms of plagiarism, the reasons they plagiarize, the sanctions imposed by academics for plagiarizing and the methods to address plagiarism in written assessments within the Faculty of Natural Sciences, University of…

Anxiety is widely recognized as a significant affective factor that influences second language (L2) writing proficiency. However, its specific contributions to writing motivation and engagement, and how it interrelates with these constructs, are not clearly defined. To address this research void, this study explored the role of anxiety in the…

In this study at a research-intensive public university, a group of eight instructors across a range of disciplines designed a writing assignment in which students (n=104) chose to write to one of three audiences--the teacher, a novice, or an adjacent expert. Students were then asked to complete a questionnaire that included open-ended questions…

Background: Delivering effective feedback to large groups of students represents a challenge for the academic staff at universities. Research suggests that undergraduate students often ignore the Elaborated Feedback (EF) received via digital learning environments. This may be because instructors provide feedback in written format instead of using…

With the growing number of students at colleges and universities who are considered nontraditional, creating an equitable classroom characterized by Universal Design for Learning has become increasingly important in higher education. In this mixed-methods exploratory study, we assess the impact of implementing flexible deadline policies into our…

This study aimed to measure a newly developed automated written evaluation feedback instrument, EditGPT, on the writing performance of 30 Omani EFL learners and their perceptions of this tool's functionality in learning English as a foreign language (EFL). The learners were divided into three groups: control (receiving general feedback on…

Due to the structured format of most engineering courses, the number of opportunities for engineering students to view matters differently from the traditional ways is limited. Therefore, a mandatory requirement was introduced into three engineering courses for students to propose an out of the ordinary solution to certain technical problems,…

Online open-ended and closed-ended surveys were conducted in 2014-2016 among 191 students at a small, private university located in South Florida. Our main goals were to evaluate student perceptions of in-class and out-of-class assignments in hybrid courses, determine what students value most about these modes of learning, and recommend ways to…