With increasing calls for authentic assessment in higher education, the reference point for authenticity has been questioned. Typically, researchers define authenticity in relation to purposes of higher education, which are contested. Advancing the notion of educational authenticity rather than professional, societal, disciplinary, or…

This paper discusses a two-year study at an Australian university in which 154 undergraduate and 51 postgraduate students reflected on their experiences with flexible and personalised assessment where they could choose assessment tasks, submission dates and weightings of their assignments. Through pre- and post-course surveys and a focus group,…

This paper discusses a 12-week, 15-credit module taught to second year undergraduates during semester 2 of 2017-18 academic year. The module, entitled 'Deschooling', aimed to explore notions of emancipatory and critical pedagogy, control and coercion in the education system. Rather than 'teach' these concepts as abstract academic theory, I aimed…

In recent years, research and practice focused on academics and students working in partnership to co-design learning and teaching in higher education has increased [Deeley and Bovill 2017. 'Staff student partnership in assessment: enhancing assessment literacy through democratic practices.' "Assessment & Evaluation in Higher…

In this paper we examine digital literacy and explicate how it relates to the philosophical study of ignorance. Using data from a study which explores the knowledge producing work of undergraduate students as they wrote course assignments, we argue that a social practice approach to digital literacy can help explain how epistemologies of ignorance…

This paper explores the emotional responses that assignment feedback can provoke in first-year undergraduates. The literature on the link between emotions and learning is well established, but surprisingly research on the relationship between emotions and feedback is still relatively scarce. This article aims to make an additional contribution to…

Students appear to have an almost insatiable appetite for receiving feedback and the scholarly literature has acknowledged its central importance for learning. And yet there is no widely accepted definition of feedback, most definitions reflecting the perspective of the teacher rather than student. When staff at the University of New South Wales…

This article considers how course design accommodates the adaptation of L2 students into the early stages of the master's dissertation (Social Sciences and Humanities) at a UK university. I present a contrastive process-oriented analysis of two students' experiences on different courses, extracted from a 13-month ethnographic study in which…

Existing research identifies that students' approaches to assignments are related to their general approaches to study. It is suggested that students need to better understand the requirements of assignments and acquire new concepts such as "argument". This fine-grained study proposes four qualitatively distinct assignment pathways: gathering,…

In response to the claim that students who have received an undergraduate degree in education lack adequate preparation for postgraduate study, the designers of a masters course in research methods set an assignment at the first meeting which asked practising teachers to match Goffman's dramaturgical concepts to observation of behaviour in public.…

This paper seeks to use a corpus-based analysis of assessment commentaries on Master's level assignments to shed light on the guidance practices of those who provide feedback. The analysis offers a set of functional categories that emerge from the corpus and uses these to consider the degree of transparency evident in the commentaries. Based on…

Evaluated a peer assessment procedure to factor in the contributions of individual group members engaged in an integrated group project. Findings demonstrated that the method resulted in a substantially wider spread of marks being given to individual students; about one-third received a grade different from the grade the project as a whole would…