Participatory research can be promoted by scientific intermediary units, such as Science Shops. The overarching goal of these initiatives is thereby to foster a process of co-creation of the research questions to address societal needs that are relevant to scientific research and society at large. The InSPIRES project was a Horizon Europe…

Education-focused roles represent a large and rapidly increasing share of the academic workforce in UK higher education. This expansion has resulted in the emergence of dedicated career tracks running in parallel with established teaching and research routes. Role descriptors and promotion criteria for these roles typically require evidence of…

In web surveys, no interviewer is present to clarify question comprehension problems, which can be particularly prevalent among respondents with low literacy skills. Although plain language is used in various contexts to improve text comprehensibility, its use in social science questionnaires has not been investigated to date. Using a…

The cry that today's higher education students are particularly individualist is a commonly-heard one. In England, the considerable personal cost of tuition is often blamed for creating a series of negative student traits, including consumerism (an idea that one has bought the right to a degree) and individualism (a sense of the individual as the…

This study examines the views of assessment of programme directors at a Portuguese public university (n = 60). Data were collected through a questionnaire which included closed and open-ended questions. The participants hold different professional categories and come from medical and health sciences, exact sciences, engineering and technology,…

Relatively little critical attention has been given specifically to 'assessments' and related processes in relation to race and racial inequalities in UK HEPs. Consequently, we know relatively little with regards to rather routine questions, such as: What are the assessment experiences of BAME students? To what extent is BAME student inclusion…

This study offers a critical examination of university policies developed to address recent challenges presented by generative AI (GenAI) to higher education assessment. Drawing on Bacchi's 'What's the problem represented to be' (WPR) framework, we analysed the GenAI policies of 20 world-leading universities to explore what are considered problems…

The purpose of this research is to determine the competencies and difficulties experienced by science teachers in developing, using, and scoring rubrics. For this purpose, the descriptive survey model was used in the research. This study was conducted with 71 science teachers working in 12 different provinces of Turkey. The availability sampling…

The present study contributes to the development of effective measures to evaluate classroom climate, especially in elementary education where these remain limited. In addition, it addresses a typical "flaw" of several studies by approaching classroom climate as a group-level construct rather than an individual characteristic. Following…

This study examined the problems that pre-service teachers face in the online assessment process and their suggestions for solutions to these problems. The participants were 136 pre-service teachers who have been experiencing online assessment for a long time and who took the Foundations of Open and Distance Learning course. This research is a…

Advocacy outcomes are not self-evident. Identifying advocacy outcomes is extremely difficult because they are often intangible, arising from (personal) interactions, and they are not always traceable. This challenges conventional evaluation methods, which is recognized in the advocacy evaluation literature. However, current evaluation methods…

This article shares lessons from the field with program evaluations in the English-Speaking Commonwealth Caribbean (ESCC) region. The research highlighted that the challenges faced by evaluators working in the ESCC are quite similar to those experienced by evaluators elsewhere. However, the findings note the impact of the region's colonial past…

This report looks at why men are more likely than women to achieve first-class degrees at Oxford and Cambridge. This situation stands in stark contrast to the UK higher education sector as a whole, where women are generally more likely to achieve both first-class honours and 'good' honours. The author argues that the first-class awarding gap…

Using students' assessments of teaching at a top university in China from 2016 to 2021, this study examines whether evaluation of teaching improves teaching quality. Given the many doubts about the validity of students' evaluation of teaching, this study adopts a methodology to distinguish teaching quality improvement from the reversal effect. It…

Formative assessment is a crucial aspect of teaching and learning in the classroom, but there is evidence that there has been a lack of effective implementation of formative assessment in practice. In response, this article outlines the design and development of a formative assessment framework that can be implemented as a consistent whole-school…