Peer review is regularly found to be a powerful and efficient technique for assessment and feedback, but many students are inexperienced and sometimes struggle to provide meaningful feedback. It is considered best practice to provide students with some training on how to be a good reviewer, but few classes can afford to devote much time to such…

Peer review is useful for providing students with formative feedback, yet it is used less frequently in STEM classrooms and for supporting writing-to-learn (WTL). While research indicates the benefits of incorporating peer review into classrooms, less research is focused on students' perceptions thereof. Such research is important as it speaks to…

While self-regulated learning (SRL) has been studied in various disciplines, insufficient attention has been paid to how formative assessment/assessment for learning (AfL) promotes students' SRL in learning English as foreign language (EFL) context. The present study attempted to address the gap. Forty four non-English majors in the second year of…

The feedback received by students on assessment tasks is a major source of their dissatisfaction with feedback generally, explaining why models of assessment continue to evolve to prioritise provision of useful feedback. Boud's notion of sustainable assessment is an example. We argue for conceptualising the sustainability of assessment practices…

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…

Competence in written scientific communication is an important learning outcome of undergraduate science degrees. Writing helps students learn, encourages them to think creatively and critically about their learning, and trains them in communicating their insights as disciplinary experts. However, challenges exist in incorporating writing…

Undergraduate students' experience of assessment in universities is usually of summative assessment which provides only limited information to help students improve their performance. By contrast, formative assessment is informative and forward-looking, possessing the leverage to inform students of their day-to-day progress and inform teachers of…

In fall 2010, the University of Massachusetts Amherst instituted a new upper-division General Education requirement, the Integrative Experience (IE), designed to help students integrate the various components of their undergraduate experience and reflect upon their learning and development as a result of those experiences, both key dimensions of…

Student consumption and recall of feedback are necessary preconditions of successful formative assessment. Drawing on Sadler's (1998) definition of formative assessment as that which is intended to accelerate learning and improve performance through the providing of feedback, we examine how the mechanism of transmission may impact student…

This paper describes a collaboration between a mathematician and a compositionist who developed a sequence of collaborative writing assignments for calculus. This sequence of developmentally appropriate assignments presents peer review as a collaborative process that promotes reflection, deepens understanding, and improves exposition. First, we…

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 &…

Application Quests are case-based learning activities that emphasize issues in professional practice and are given as part of the classroom learning process. This qualitative investigation examined students' views regarding the perceived impacts that Application Quests had on their learning. A phenomenological analysis of written assignments from…