Higher education initiatives to support students from low socioeconomic backgrounds are widespread. However, there is pervasive concern within public discourse that such widening participation efforts have contributed to a 'dumbing down' of higher education. There are classed dimensions to evaluations of (dis)advantaged students' university…

In this paper, we show how children's creativity manifests in literary aesthetics and how they explore moral subjects as a result. Literary aesthetics involve a range of artistic elements or expressions within a textual work. Writers may use aesthetic properties to express individual appreciation or how people view the world, often in relation to…

There has been substantial research on doctoral supervision and examination, yet rarely a focus on what happens at the end-stage of the process when examiner feedback is received and addressed. This article reports survey findings (n = 262) from a study investigating supervisor perceptions about Australian end-stage doctoral examination processes.…

ChatGPT, a sophisticated online chatbot, sent shockwaves through many sectors once reports filtered through that it could pass exams. In higher education, it has raised many questions about the authenticity of assessment and challenges in detecting plagiarism. Amongst the resulting frenetic hubbub, hints of potential opportunities in how ChatGPT…

Purpose: Punctuation is traditionally seen to represent grammatical structures in writing, but some authors argue that it can also reflect the intonation and pauses of speech. In two experiments, we examined the influence of grammar and prosody on adults' judgments of comma placement. Method: University students rated the appropriateness of commas…

Feedback is a cultural tool through which English teachers can facilitate secondary students' evaluative expertise in their writing development. While there is increased concern to use feedback to enhance learning at all educational levels, there is currently little empirical knowledge of how secondary teachers of English design feedback for…

According to creative writing pedagogies academic Susanne Gannon ("English in Australia, 54"(2), 43-56, 2019), and the Federal government-commissioned NAPLAN review (McGaw et al., 2020), NAPLAN has restricted how writing is taught in secondary schools. A NAPLAN-influenced structural approach to teaching writing has subsumed the…

This work aims to characterize students' writing processes using keystroke logs and understand how the extracted characteristics influence the text quality at specific moments of writing. Earlier works have proposed predictive models characterizing students' writing processes and mainly rely on distribution-based measures of pauses obtained from…

Authentic writing is an important aspect in education and research. Unfortunately, academic misconduct occurs among students and researchers. Consequently, written articles undergo certain detection measures and most teaching and research institutions use a range of software to detect plagiarism. However, state-of-the-art Automatic Article…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore the impact of differences in educational traditions on conventions of teaching and learning, and on the measurement of learning outcomes. These are critical issues within the context of business schools that are steeped in one dominant tradition but have a large population of international students previously…

Children's writing development is a matter of concern for Australian and other education systems. Factors related to the nature of writing as a literate skill, school writing pedagogy, and diminishing role of writing in a screen-dominant environment may account for this educational concern. What happens in a child's writing when immigrant parents…

This article examines the publicly available English Examination Notes from the New South Wales Higher School Certificate (HSC) Marking Centre, alongside past research on writing development, to understand the summative assessment of writing and the qualities of writing that examiners identified as discriminating between samples of different…

The rapid decline in Australian students' performance on the "National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy" (NAPLAN) writing test is an issue of national concern. This paper presents the first investigation into patterns of achievement and progress on the NAPLAN writing test across the tested year levels (3, 5, 7 and 9) between…

The widespread, theoretically-informed practice of curricula embedded academic language and learning development is generally acknowledged as the most productive method of improving tertiary student outcomes. University-wide comprehensive support, however, for the collaborative processes of interdisciplinary research, design, resource and staff…

Hattie and Timperley's (2007) model of effective feedback, widely used in teacher professional development, provides an easily-applied framework for thinking about the information contained in feedback. However, the model simplifies a complex phenomenon shaped in practice by interpersonal, disciplinary and institutional aspects. Examining the…