Teachers spend much of their time on assessment, yet many higher education educators have received minimal guidance on assessment design and marking. This means assessment can often be a source of ...stress and frustration. Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education aims to solve these problems. Offering a concise overview of assessment theory and practice, this guide provides teachers with the help they need. In education, theory and practice are often poorly linked. In this guide, Teresa McConlogue presents theoretical ideas and research findings and links them to practice. She considers recent theoretical work on feedback and suggests ways of developing evaluative judgement. Throughout the book, teachers are encouraged to examine their practice critically, and there are ideas for small-scale educational investigations, involving teachers, their colleagues and students, such as using the Assessment Review Questionnaire to adapt assessments. A key principle of Assessment and Feedback in Higher Education is that an understanding of academic standards is fundamental to good assessment design and more reliable marking. The guide explores the concept of academic standards and proposes methods of co-constructing shared standards within a teaching team and with students through calibration activities.
In educational settings, analyzing textual data via content analysis is a popular research method. The data is a valuable source of information as it offers deep insights into learning and learning ...outcomes. In practice, it can be used to improve classroom diagnostics and instruction. Nowadays, technology such as learning analytics can be used for the same cause. For both purposes, reliable research instruments are needed. Content analysis, often the measure of choice, is required to meet quality criteria such as objectivity, reliability and validity. However, some of the reliability measures most frequently used have lately been discussed controversially, indicating that there is room for improvement. The first generation of the Iota concept caters to the idea of improved reliability measures for content analysis done by humans or artificial intelligences. In this book, the authors introduce a refined measure: The Iota concept of the second generation. In contrast to pre-existing measures, second generation Iota can for example a) provide insights into the reliability of every single category of a scale and how a coding scheme may produce bias, b) provide rules of thumb for evaluating content analysis and c) provide possibilities for data replication and error-corrected data. This book is structured as a guide for researchers that want to learn more about the mechanics and details of the Iota concept or use it as the reliability measure of choice in their research.
Score reporting research is no longer limited to the psychometric properties of scores and subscores. Today, it encompasses design and evaluation for particular audiences, appropriate use of ...assessment outcomes, the utility and cognitive affordances of graphical representations, interactive report systems, and more. By studying how audiences understand the intended messages conveyed by score reports, researchers and industry professionals can develop more effective mechanisms for interpreting and using assessment data. Score Reporting Research and Applications brings together experts who design and evaluate score reports in both K-12 and higher education contexts and who conduct foundational research in related areas. The first section covers foundational validity issues in the use and interpretation of test scores; design principles drawn from related areas including cognitive science, human-computer interaction, and data visualization; and research on presenting specific types of assessment information to various audiences. The second section presents real-world applications of score report design and evaluation and of the presentation of assessment information. Across ten chapters, this volume offers a comprehensive overview of new techniques and possibilities in score reporting.
An argument that choice-based, process-oriented educational assessments are more effective than static assessments of fact retrieval.
If a fundamental goal of education is to prepare students to act ...independently in the world—in other words, to make good choices—an ideal educational assessment would measure how well we are preparing students to do so. Current assessments, however, focus almost exclusively on how much knowledge students have accrued and can retrieve. In Measuring What Matters Most, Daniel Schwartz and Dylan Arena argue that choice should be the interpretive framework within which learning assessments are organized. Digital technologies, they suggest, make this possible; interactive assessments can evaluate students in a context of choosing whether, what, how, and when to learn.
Schwartz and Arena view choice not as an instructional ingredient to improve learning but as the outcome of learning. Because assessments shape public perception about what is useful and valued in education, choice-based assessments would provide a powerful lever in this reorientation in how people think about learning.
Schwartz and Arena consider both theoretical and practical matters. They provide an anchoring example of a computerized, choice-based assessment, argue that knowledge-based assessments are a mismatch for our educational aims, offer concrete examples of choice-based assessments that reveal what knowledge-based assessments cannot, and analyze the practice of designing assessments. Because high variability leads to innovation, they suggest democratizing assessment design to generate as many instances as possible. Finally, they consider the most difficult aspect of assessment: fairness. Choice-based assessments, they argue, shed helpful light on fairness considerations.
This book analyses and discusses the recent developments for assessing research quality in the humanities and related fields in the social sciences. Research assessments in the humanities are highly ...controversial and the evaluation of humanities research is delicate. While citation-based research performance indicators are widely used in the natural and life sciences, quantitative measures for research performance meet strong opposition in the humanities. This volume combines the presentation of state-of-the-art projects on research assessments in the humanities by humanities scholars themselves with a description of the evaluation of humanities research in practice presented by research funders. Bibliometric issues concerning humanities research complete the exhaustive analysis of humanities research assessment. The selection of authors is well-balanced between humanities scholars, research funders, and researchers on higher education. Hence, the edited volume succeeds in painting a comprehensive picture of research evaluation in the humanities. This book is valuable to university and science policy makers, university administrators, research evaluators, bibliometricians as well as humanities scholars who seek expert knowledge in research evaluation in the humanities.
The second edition of University Teaching in Focus distils the knowledge and insights of internationally acclaimed experts in university teaching. It empowers university teachers and contributes to ...their career success by developing their teaching skills, strategies and knowledge.
Written in a clear and accessible style, it provides a sharp focus on student learning through the lens of four sections:
Focus on subject and curriculum design
Focus on subject teaching and learning
Focus on students
Focus on your career
Each of the 15 chapters targets a key teaching and learning issue referencing seminal works, current resources and practical applications using real-world cases. The ‘Your thoughts’ sections encourage reflection and offer opportunities to adapt international evidence about best practice to local contexts and disciplines.
This edition will be a key resource for foundational teaching development programs in higher education institutions or as a self-help manual by early career and experienced teachers who wish to enhance their students’ learning.
This open access volume explores peer review in the scientific community and academia. While peer review is as old as modern science itself, recent changes in the evaluation culture of higher ...education systems have increased the use of peer review, and its purposes, forms and functions have become more diversified. This book put together a comprehensive set of conceptual and empirical contributions on various peer review practices with relevance for the scientific community and higher education institutions worldwide. Consisting of three parts, the editors and contributors examine the history, problems and developments of peer review, as well as the specificities of various peer review practices. In doing so, this book gives an overview on and examine peer review , and asks how it can move forward. This is an open access book.
The worldwide imposed lockdowns forced schools and universities to digitise conventional teaching in a very short time and to convert teaching and learning formats partially or completely to Distance ...Learning. The changes in everyday teaching brought by Distance Learning were felt worldwide. With 22 double blind peerreviewed articles of researchers reporting on 17 different countries, the editors of this book want to shed light on the effects of Distance Learning in different regions of the world. This will allow for a value-free comparison of how the COVID-19 pandemic has been addressed in education in different parts of the world and what impacts it has had, is having or may have in the future.
This book provides a significant contribution to the increasing conversation concerning the place of big data in education. Offering a multidisciplinary approach with a diversity of perspectives from ...international scholars and industry experts, chapter authors engage in both research- and industry-informed discussions and analyses on the place of big data in education, particularly as it pertains to large-scale and ongoing assessment practices moving into the digital space. This volume offers an innovative, practical, and international view of the future of current opportunities and challenges in education and the place of assessment in this context.
This open access book presents a large number of innovations in the world of operational testing. It brings together different but related areas and provides insight in their possibilities, their ...advantages and drawbacks. The book not only addresses improvements in the quality of educational measurement, innovations in (inter)national large scale assessments, but also several advances in psychometrics and improvements in computerized adaptive testing, and it also offers examples on the impact of new technology in assessment. Due to its nature, the book will appeal to a broad audience within the educational measurement community. It contributes to both theoretical knowledge and also pays attention to practical implementation of innovations in testing technology.
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