Student experience of Assessment for Learning (AfL) pedagogies ideally provides multiple entry points for students to take past learning forward into future learning. In practice, points of disconnection may confound the accessibility of AfL's repertoire of practices. This paper investigates the AfL experiences of students with likely language and…

Resit exams allow students who have failed a subject a second chance to demonstrate achievement of the academic standards required for program progression. Contrary to previous studies in this field, this paper reports on the value of resit exams with a comprehensive discussion of the lessons learned from the implementation of resits in different…

There is growing recognition of the value of the Arts in helping shape understandings and capabilities for life essential for meeting the challenges of the 21st century. Consequently, in Australia, the Arts are now mandated for all students from kindergarten to year 9. In the lower secondary setting, this has led to a high demand for educators…

SMART goals (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and timed) are advocated as the gold standard for goal setting. However, goals which are non-specific and exploratory, referred to as 'open goals', may be preferred in specific circumstances. In this pre-registered experiment, we compared SMART goals, compared to do-your-best (DYB), and…

Higher education is moving towards being more inclusive. However, students with disabilities continue to report that their assessment experiences are less than optimal. In these situations, if an assessment format does not enable demonstration of achievement due to aspects irrelevant to the capabilities of interest, then such students are unfairly…

The U@Uni Academy provides a case study of a composite preparation and access programme, integrating key elements of widening participation, alternate entry and enabling schemes. It is offered to students from a low socioeconomic background and focuses on non-traditional indicators of attainment in order to prepare for, access and successfully…

Higher education institutions increasingly expect students to work effectively and critically with multiple modes, semiotic resources and digital tools. However, assessment practices are often insufficient to capture how multimodal artefacts represent disciplinary knowledge in complex ways. This study explores and theorises the design and…

While literacy research in the area of multimodality includes a range of communication modes, the combination of the visual and verbal modes is arguably the most common multimodal text form used in classroom contexts from posters, charts and information texts to picture books and graphic novels. Assessment of students' understanding of visual and…

This article draws on three assessment paradigms -- psychometrics, outcomes-based and curriculum-based assessment -- to discuss paradigmatic changes in senior school assessment and achievement standard-setting in Queensland, Australia, over the last 50 years. These include radical reforms in 1970 from university-controlled examinations to…

This article reports on an exploratory two-stage sequential mixed methods research study that investigated the views of university educators on the introduction of assessment methods other than essays, exams and dissertations within taught Masters programmes. In the first stage, interviews were conducted internationally with 45 participants and…

This article reports on a practitioner action research project focused on developing, trialing, and reflecting upon a continuous and formative-assessment plan for a foundational New Testament survey course. Three pedagogical convictions are discussed and drive the design of the assessment. Seven to nine assessment items (depending on level of…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide a critical interpretative analysis of an innovative model of assessment in subject English in New South Wales, Australia. The purpose of this paper is to explore the theoretical and practical dimensions of assessment in the English Extension 2 course. This course forms part of suite of senior secondary English…

This article uses an auto-ethnographic approach to explore the reflections and insights that occurred during my teaching of a subject in adolescent development on the Thai Burma border. This paper adopts a relatively descriptive style to a personal reflection of teaching on the border and how it transformed the way I teach and made me look at the…

The primary purpose of this study was to determine the effectiveness of dynamic testing as a method for identifying high academic potential in Australian Aboriginal children. The 79 participating Aboriginal children were drawn from Years 3-5 in rural schools in northern New South Wales. The dynamic testing method used in this study involved a…

Assessing student learning in university courses is commonly done using a rubric that arranges the assessment criteria and standards descriptors in a matrix style or grid format. This paper introduces an alternative style of grading tool known as the continua model of a guide to making judgements, which arranges assessment criteria based on a…