The cry that today's higher education students are particularly individualist is a commonly-heard one. In England, the considerable personal cost of tuition is often blamed for creating a series of negative student traits, including consumerism (an idea that one has bought the right to a degree) and individualism (a sense of the individual as the…

This study examines the views of assessment of programme directors at a Portuguese public university (n = 60). Data were collected through a questionnaire which included closed and open-ended questions. The participants hold different professional categories and come from medical and health sciences, exact sciences, engineering and technology,…

This study offers a critical examination of university policies developed to address recent challenges presented by generative AI (GenAI) to higher education assessment. Drawing on Bacchi's 'What's the problem represented to be' (WPR) framework, we analysed the GenAI policies of 20 world-leading universities to explore what are considered problems…

Formative assessment is a crucial aspect of teaching and learning in the classroom, but there is evidence that there has been a lack of effective implementation of formative assessment in practice. In response, this article outlines the design and development of a formative assessment framework that can be implemented as a consistent whole-school…

Due to the unprecedented COVID-19 incident, higher education institutions have faced different challenges in their teaching-learning activities. Particularly conducting assessments remotely during COVID-19 has posed extraordinary challenges for higher education institutions owing to lack of preparation superimposed with the inherent problems of…

Assessment in higher education is a complex path to navigate, with unexpected twists and turns. Although many studies project the positive outcomes of assessment for learning, the outcomes do not always match the intention. Even when formative assessment is well-planned, the implementation may take such a toll, leaving a lecturer physically…

This qualitative study utilized episodic narrative interviews to investigate assessment thresholds involved in the development of assessment literacy. The goal of the study was to inform efforts toward quality improvements in higher education. Thirty-five academic staff from universities in Australia, Canada and Sweden shared stories of…

This study examines business students' learning and assessment under remote teachings during the COVID-19 pandemic in a well-established Finnish university. A survey method is used to collect information on 336 business students including 42 accounting students. As indicated by students' responses, a majority of the students succeeded in assessing…

Mathematical reasoning is foundational to making sense of mathematics. Yet assessing mathematical reasoning can be challenging for teachers. This paper reports on a project where teachers taught two lessons with a specific focus on reasoning and came together with other teachers at their school to attempt to assess the reasoning of their students.…

This research addresses the types of assessment tasks, the assessment criteria, instruments and procedures of communicative competence used by primary school teachers in Andalusia. This multiple-case study drew on the experiences of teachers from four schools in the south of Spain. The data source has been the focus groups in which the teachers…

Self-directed learning, despite its growing popularity in education, has challenged conventional assessment practice which often foregrounds the presentation of identical conditions to ensure reliability. This article discusses the results of a case study of university academic English teachers' perceptions and reported practices of assessing…

Quantitative measures of student performance are increasingly used as proxies of educational quality and teacher ability. Such assessments assume that the quality of educational practices can be unambiguously quantitatively measured and that such measures are sufficiently precise and robust to be aggregated into policy-relevant rankings like…

This article examines a government attempt to impose testing of 4-year-olds as a baseline against which to "hold primary schools accountable" for children's subsequent progress. It examines the various forms of baseline testing in this experiment and analyses the misleading claims made for the "predictive validity" of baseline…

This article reveals three emerging areas of conflict in the use of educational assessment instruments in compulsory education in Switzerland and outlines an analytical approach for detecting and analysing these areas of conflict. The approach combines a conceptual perspective, an evaluation perspective and a teaching perspective to show the…

Large classes are a reality in many tertiary programmes in the South African context and this involves several challenges. One of these is the assessment process, including the provision of meaningful feedback and implementing strategies to support struggling students. Due to large student numbers, multiple-choice questions (MCQs) are often used…