Classroom-based assessments have the potential to enhance validity by facilitating the assessment of important skills that are difficult to assess in written examinations. Such assessments tend to be marked by teachers. To ensure consistent marking standards, quality assurance procedures are needed. In the context of continued debate over the…

In the United Kingdom, the majority of national assessments involve human raters. The processes by which raters determine the scores to award are central to the assessment process and affect the extent to which valid inferences can be made from assessment outcomes. Thus, understanding rater cognition has become a growing area of research in the…

Examiners' grading judgements are central to the maintenance of examination standards. This research investigated the judgement processes underpinning examination grading. Operating under a think aloud protocol, six examiners conducted a grading exercise for each of two geography A level examinations. They also "thought aloud" whilst…

The judgement processes underpinning examination marking are central to achieving fair assessment but are under-researched. This article draws on existing literature and uses additional analysis of data collected in a previous article "Exploring the nature of examiner thinking during the process of examination marking", to start to piece together…

Despite the abundant literature on educational measurement there has been relatively little work investigating the psychological processes underpinning marking. This research investigated the processes involved when examiners mark examination responses. Scripts from two geography A-level examinations were used: one requiring short and medium…

This article investigates whether verbal protocol analysis is a sound methodology in the context of researching examination marking processes. As part of a larger study, six examiners marked fifty scripts at home and some further scripts during meetings (some silently and some whilst thinking aloud) for two A level examinations. Some scripts were…