Used correctly, assessments play a vital role in the success of a course: they provide valuable feedback to students regarding their knowledge gaps, encourage deeper understanding of the material, help students to develop critical thinking, and guide students to accomplish a course's learning goals. They also provide a signal to future employers,…

A desired outcome of education reform efforts is for undergraduates to effectively integrate knowledge across disciplines in order to evaluate and address real-world issues. Yet there are few assessments designed to measure if and how students think interdisciplinarily. Here, a sample of science faculty were surveyed to understand how they…

The patchwork text is an assessment method whereby students produce and share short pieces of writing over the course of a module that are subsequently integrated in a final summative piece. This paper reports on the experience of using this method of assessment in a criminal justice module. The objective behind introducing this form of assessment…

I describe a novel research-led module that combines reduced academic marking loads with increased feedback to students, and allows students to reflect on and improve attainment prior to summative assessment. The module is based around eight seminar-style presentations (one per week), on which the students write 500-word "news &…

We implemented two different approaches of using peer review to support undergraduate essay assignments for students taking large second-year courses in life sciences and biology: a web-based online peer review (OPR) approach and a more traditional face-to-face peer review (FPR) approach that was conducted in tutorial settings. The essays…

In the late 1970s, poet Lewis MacAdams labeled the many writers beginning to visit schools as "wild cards in the deck of education," bringing fresh possibilities to a somewhat staid curriculum. Now, nearly thirty years later, the authors wonder if it isn't time to renew the metaphor, as everyone strive to name what happens when poets bring their…

Providing effective feedback on writing is a challenge in any learning environment, but it is even more problematic in fully online instruction. The lack of face-to-face interaction in web-based classes increases the need for highly transparent, prompt, and personalized feedback. Student views on the use of a semi-structured template combined with…

As class sizes increase, methods of assessments shift from costly traditional approaches (e.g. expert-graded writing assignments) to more economic and logistically feasible methods (e.g. multiple-choice testing, computer-automated scoring, or peer assessment). While each method of assessment has its merits, it is peer assessment in particular,…

Student learning assessment has become one of the central issues of public policy and accountability in higher education. Since the mid-1980s, a number of federal and state commissions and policy organizations have emphasized the importance of assessment for a variety of institutional practices, including student retention, graduation rates, and…