Educationalists have had serious problems in proposing well-grounded ways of teaching critical thinking. Reviews of the field have called for research to develop theory concerning the learning experience associated with critical thinking enhancement, as well as to explore more tailored teaching and evaluation methods. This article suggests an…

The paper attempts to give an overview of evaluation in higher education institutions with particular emphasis on the faculties of humanities, education and social sciences disciplines at the University of Eswatini (Swaziland) in Southern Africa. It describes the general methodology of evaluation and identifies obstacles and relevant strategies…

Assessment is often used to promote learning, but the mechanisms of how assessment relates to epistemology -- knowledge and knowing -- have been scarcely studied and theorised. In this study, we examine students' epistemic resources in relation assessment in the context of university mathematics education. We draw on the theoretical framework of…

Measuring lexical diversity in texts that have different lengths is problematic because length has a significant effect on the number of types a text contains, thus hampering any comparison. Treffers-Daller et al. (2018) recommended a simple solution, namely counting the number of types in a section of a given length that was extracted from the…

The upsurge of ICT media and hybrid modalities for learning that stemmed from the world health crisis seem to be destined to stay. In this new paradigm, self-assessment processes have acquired an even more relevant role in the teaching learning process than they already had. Due to the myriad of academic online resources and information at their…

The proliferation of large language models represents a paradigm shift in the landscape of automated essay scoring (AES) systems, fundamentally elevating their accuracy and efficacy. This study presents an extensive examination of large language models, with a particular emphasis on the transformative influence of transformer-based models, such as…

The aim of this study was to identify process-related indicators for grading group essays. The research participants were students registered in a teacher-training course using an instructional design with face-to-face and digital blended learning. The course required the students in small collaborative groups to design, implement, and evaluate a…

It is widely believed that raters' cognition is an important aspect of writing assessment, as it has both logical and temporal priority over scores. Based on a critical review of previous research in this area, it is found that raters' cognition can be boiled to two fundamental issues: building text images and strategies for articulating scores.…

Comparative Judgement (CJ) is an increasingly widely investigated method in assessment for creating a scale, for example of the quality of essays. One area that has attracted attention in CJ studies is the optimisation of the selection of pairs of objects for judgement. One approach is known as adaptive comparative judgement (ACJ). It has been…

In this article, I report on examiners' views and experiences of using Pairwise Comparative Judgement (PCJ) and Rank Ordering (RO) as alternatives to traditional analytical marking for GCSE English Language essays. Fifteen GCSE English Language examiners took part in the study. After each had judged 100 pairs of essays using PCJ and eight packs of…

Writing comprehensibly, dynamically, and persuasively in a foreign language is a significant challenge for learners. Written communication assesses language and writing progress for various summative and developmental goals. Scenario-based assessment (SBA), as one of the methodologies of classroom-based assessment (CBA), aims to elicit both…

In this work, we explore the use of digital technologies and statistical analysis to monitor how Italian secondary school students' writing changes over time and how comparisons can be made across different high school types. We analyzed more than 2,000 exam essays written by Italian high school students over 13 years and in five different school…

This essay considers the relative merits of critical writing and writing in role as a means of enabling and assessing students' responses to literary texts. Drawing largely on the author's experience of teaching "Frankenstein," it argues that the distinction between critical and creative writing is not as absolute as is sometimes…

This study investigated the impact of an online peer-review script on students' argumentative peer-review quality and argumentative essay writing. A pre- and post-test experimental design was used with 42 undergraduate students in the field of educational science. Students were randomly divided over 21 dyads and assigned to two conditions…

While there is general agreement among learners, teachers, and scholars that constructive feedback on writing is necessary to revision, there are fewer consensuses on how feedback should be given, when, by whom, and what sort of feedback is most effective (Weigle, 2014). Providing feedback on writing is generally categorized into three types:…