In higher education, the role of assessment has evolved from serving only the purpose of evaluation of the outcomes of the learning process to assessment as part of the learning purposes. Summative or formative, the potential of assessment to facilitate learning is now recognised. Feedback is one of the most influential factors on learning but is…

Meta-syntheses have reported positive impacts of feedback for student achievement at different stages of education and have been influential in establishing feedback as an effective strategy to support student learning. However, these syntheses combine studies of a variety of different feedback approaches, combine studies where feedback is one of…

Linguistic errors are pervasive in second language (L2) students' writing. Depending on their gravity, the errors may cause a minor degree of irritation to the reader or even lead to total communication breakdown. As such, errors have always been a major concern to both students and teachers, and error correction has also assumed a central…

The topic of feedback to students is an under-researched area, and there has been little empirical research published which focuses on student perceptions. This study explores student perceptions of written feedback and examines whether feedback received demonstrated a student-centred approach to learning. A multi-method approach of qualitative…

The findings from research on written and oral summarization are discussed under three headings: summarizers' strategies, improving summarizers' performance, and the assessment of summary quality. Objective measures of summary quality used by researchers are described, and ways these measures could be adapted for use in higher education assessment…

This paper examines the evidence for two explanatory propositions for the striking similarity found between verbal descriptions of the written language of deaf students and descriptions of their personalities. The proposition that language difficulties invalidate the diagnostic process for deaf students is supported. (Author/DB)

Originally presented at a symposium on cognition and written language, the 14 papers in this collection discuss research findings regarding reading and writing processes, ways that the development of effective reading and writing can be abetted by instruction, and research needs in the area of cognition and written language. The papers focus on…