Medical school admissions is a contentious and high stakes selection activity. Many assessment approaches are available to support selection; but how are decisions about building, monitoring, and adapting admissions systems made? What shapes the processes and practices that underpin selection decisions? We explore how these decisions are made…

Study Skills in any guise are integral to Higher Education worldwide, existing to help student success. Some argue generic or bolt-on Study Skills do not help with success, others that embedded Study Skills do, but no-one advocates actually evaluating Study Skills in a context of success defined as helping with student educational gain and…

Student engagement needs to be context-specific to embrace holistic learning for increasingly diverse students in higher education. This paper presented a case study on the context-specific adaptation of a student engagement measure for a private university in Bangladesh. The adaptation process involved steps such as benchmarking theoretically…

Health sciences students face many challenges in regard to clinical practical learning. A better understanding of student learning is required to address student needs in this crucial phase. The theory of self-regulated learning provides a comprehensive view of learning and could serve as a basis for further research. There are instruments to…

The Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education (GAISE) College Report advocates for use of real data with context and purpose. This work contributes to the growing literature on assessing statistical literacy by investigating the influence of context as it relates to assessment performance among post-secondary introductory…

Research-based assessments in postsecondary chemistry education have been widely developed and published, but their use has not enjoyed the same level of focus in the chemistry education research literature as evidence-based instructional practices. Several high-quality assessment strategies have been developed for use in postsecondary chemistry…

Universities administer assessments for accountability and program improvement. Student effort is low during assessments due to minimal perceived consequences. The effects of low effort are compounded by assessment context. This project investigates validity concerns caused by minimal effort and exacerbated by contextual factors. Systematic…

Generative AI (GenAI) is transforming higher education. It has already challenged the validity of traditional assessment methods and revealed concerns about the authenticity and reliability of conventional approaches. This opinion piece proposes an expanded theoretical framework for contextual learning, incorporating practical, situational,…

Program evaluations that lack experimental design often fail to produce evidence of impact because there is no available control group. Theory-based evaluations can generate evidence of a program's causal effects if evaluators collect evidence along the theorized causal chain and identify possible competing causes. However, few methods are…

This study investigated EFL teachers' underlying assumptions about assessment and how these assumptions are congruent with current perspectives in assessment. Informed by interpretivist philosophical underpinnings, the study adopted qualitative research approach. Nine teachers from three universities located in western Ethiopia participated in the…

A partially-automated method of assessment is proposed, in which automated question setting is used to generate individualized versions of a coursework assignment, which is completed by students and marked by hand. This is designed to be (a) comparable to a traditional written coursework assignment in validity, in that complex and open-ended tasks…

Reflective practice (RP) has been widely promoted in many second language teacher education programs to foster pre-service teachers' pedagogical competence. However, the effectiveness of RP has often been questioned and challenged due to its lack of authenticity in practice. This Viewpoint paper focuses on the issue of authenticity of RP and how…

This perspective paper describes the strategic development of evaluation and organizational learning programs focused on building core knowledge and skills at a university with high research activity. New program development allows academic leaders to introduce relevant and cutting-edge knowledge to students. Nevertheless, the program development…

We report on a series of task-based interviews in which nine mathematicians were asked to evaluate a series of six mathematical arguments, purportedly produced either by fellow mathematicians or undergraduate students. In this paper, we attend to the role of context in mathematicians' responses, leading to four themes in expectations when…

Research on Nature of Science (NOS) conceptions and identity development for NOS contains a gap in the realm of examining doctoral students aiming to be science teacher educators. This research examines the NOS identity development of participants in a course focused on the philosophy of science and research about NOS education. The data analyzed…