Authentic assessments are designed to evaluate knowledge and skills that are relevant for students' life beyond university, emphasising practical, applied skills. They offer an alternative to assessments that don't explicitly foster transferability of skills. The present study examined undergraduate student perceptions of authentic and traditional…

An objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) has been recognised as a reliable but workload-intensive assessment method across health sciences studies. Though a variety of digital marking tools have been employed to improve marking and feedback provision for OSCEs, many of these require specialist software or maintenance. This pilot study…

The doctoral defence is the oral examination of the doctoral thesis. While it is a major milestone for doctoral candidates, this event is often shrouded in mystery. In this article, I explore the doctoral defence from an international perspective. I have studied the format of the defence based on written testimonies as well as the literature on…

This article asks the question of what documentation is doing, rather than what documentation means in the context of early childhood education. By focusing on the documentation of a young child's playful exploration with water that inhabits a classroom wall, new materialist theories are put to work to ponder documentation's agentive capacities…

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…

Couple-based interventions that address domestic abuse are an emerging area of practice within the UK. These interventions require a detailed assessment process that can clarify risk and needs and screen out couples for whom such intervention is unsuitable. Steps to Safety is a new intervention, grounded in attachment and trauma theory, for…

Dynamic Assessment (DA) is an interactive form of cognitive assessment used by some educational psychologists (EPs) to assess the learning potential of children and young people, through a focus on cognitive and affective aspects of learning. In terms of UK EP practice, this approach has the potential to complement the focus on 'person-centred…

The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL) offers a bottom-up, locally situated and contextualized approach to enhancing educational practice. It has been championed for several years, yet remains curiously undervalued within the academy, despite clear benefits for curricular development and staff engagement. This paper reflects upon the…

Undergraduate programmes on construction management and other closely related built environment disciplines are currently taught and assessed on a modular basis. This is the case in the UK and in many other countries globally. However, it can be argued that professionally oriented programmes like these are better assessed on a non-modular basis,…

This paper reports on what has happened since Elliott ("Dynamic Assessment in Educational Settings: Realising Potential," 2003) in those applications of dynamic assessment that he considered. There continues to be two broad applications, one, largely researcher led, and the other, largely practitioner led, although there are examples of…

This narrative literature review evaluates the effectiveness of synthetic phonics in comparison with analytic phonics. It presents the key research findings and offers a critical appraisal of this research. Primary schools have developed a variety of assessment processes which assess pupils' knowledge and skills in synthetic phonics. It is through…

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…

The research informing this paper set out to investigate the qualitative experiences of students, supervisors and tutors involved in a summative collaborative assessment of placement learning on an undergraduate professional qualifying programme in the UK. Analysis of data gathered through semi-structured interviews provides valuable insights into…

The author discusses the importance of listening to children and engaging them in dialogue about their learning. She does not accept that assessment should entail labelling children and believes such practices encourage a culture of fixed "ability" thinking. Through examples of specific children, the author illustrates the importance of…

The Office for Standards in Education's most recently published criteria for "outstanding" teaching are scrutinised and found wanting. They are seen as unrealistic for teachers to meet and equally unrealistic as criteria for use by inspectors. An explanation is offered as to why they are framed as they are and an alternative, more…