Toward the end of the nineteenth century a number of external music examining systems were introduced to New Zealand. Two of them, Trinity College, London, and the Associated Board, gained a strong following and became de facto standards in the absence of a national music conservatorium. This article briefly outlines the beginning of external…

There are multiple challenges associated with participating in a first-year undergraduate management unit at the university level. Students' performance in such units is a critical milestone in their learning journey and can create positive/negative inertia for their future performance and continuation in a program. Through exploratory abductive…

This paper reports on a study that replaced marks with digital badges in an undergraduate Initial Teacher Education course. The aim was to examine the impact of badging on students, and on the quality of university provision. Data collection consisted of surveys and focus groups. The study found that while digital badges had considerable potential…

Modern economics courses require high mathematical proficiency, and low proficiency may reduce grades or cause students to avoid economics courses. The article's authors sought to improve students' mathematical skills and grades with a simple intervention based on repeated quizzing of building-block concepts. They analyzed data from four semesters…

Implementation of the European Higher Education Area changed the assessment model in higher education towards a competence-based system, so that students are assessed by what they demonstrate they can do (competences). However, assessment of certain key competences, such as reading, ceases at higher education. The question remains whether reading…

Research approaches to better engage student learning regarding the determinants of health are somewhat limited. The present study highlights the evolution of an authentic fieldwork assessment and the strategies nursing students used as they navigated the assessment for learning activity outside the classroom, and how these impacted student's…

Within Australia, Vocational Education and Training (VET) is promoted as a pathway for low socioeconomic status (LSES) students to enter Higher Education (HE). However, greater equity will only occur if these students achieve successful university outcomes. But how should such success be defined? This paper examined two data sources (i.e., nine…

This article builds on research, previously published in this journal, which tracked student outcomes in a first year core course in an Australian university over the space of 6 years. That research found that a fundamental shift in educator attitude - away from problematising student disadvantage, to seeing student disadvantage as an…

This study investigated school connectedness, student engagement, academic grades, and student affect. Factor analyses of 331 adolescent students (Years 7, 9, and 11 in Australia), validated a four-factor model of school engagement. The factors revealed in the analyses were described as (1) future and task focus, (2) planning and motivation, (3)…

Active-learning pedagogical practices are encouraged in the education literature to improve academic outcomes. The research reported in this paper explored the effect of real-time interactive polling--a type of active learning--on three measures of academic outcome: final marks, student engagement, and failure probability. To provide credible…

This study introduces data mining methods to accounting education scholarship to explore the relationship between accounting students' current academic performance (grades), demographic information, pre-university entrance scores and predicted academic performance. It adopts a C4.5 classification algorithm based on decision-tree analysis to…

Integrated curriculum encourages diverse cohorts of students to engage in relevant and meaningful activities that can be connected to their interests both in and beyond the classroom. This research investigated whether contextualising the content and learning activities to specific cohorts, while retaining the same assessments and learning…

While personal performance-approach goals (PAp goals) have already been successfully bifurcated into normative and appearance PAp goals, the same distinction has not yet been applied to performance-approach goal structures (PAp goal structures). The present study therefore aimed to (a) test the factorial two-level structure of PAp goal structures…

Nearly all college students require some academic assistance throughout their learning experiences. Rather than a dependent act, help-seeking is a self-regulated and motivated strategy; however, there are mixed findings regarding the relationship between academic help-seeking and academic achievement. Thus, the current study used meta-analytic…

Blended learning can create flexibility for students, more efficiently utilise infrastructure, and can provide high-quality learning at scale. We investigated perceived value and learning gains associated with asynchronous eLearning and synchronous face-to-face (f2f) components of a blended learning experience. We hypothesised that individual…