Getting the Message Across: The problem of communicating assessment feedback

Current literature provides useful insights into the role of assessment feedback in student learning, yet fails to recognise its complexity as a unique form of communication. This article outlines ideas emerging from ongoing research into the meaning and impact of assessment feedback for students in higher education. We argue that new models of communication are required to understand students' responses to the language of tutors' comments, and that issues of discourse, identity, power, control and social relationships should be central to any understanding of assessment feedback as a communication process. Implications of adopting an alternative perspective for research and practice are identified and discussed.     

Learning from Coursework in English and Geography

As an element of high stakes assessment, coursework was originally intended to raise the validity of the assessment process and to enhance the learning of students. In recent years, this purpose has been distorted by the increasing requirements for educational institutions to demonstrate standards and to be accountable. This small, ESRC-funded study used in-depth qualitative approaches to explore the nature and processes of learning from coursework in national examinations undertaken by 16 year-old students. Among other things, it probed the extent to which qualities such as independent learning, critical thinking and creativity were developed through coursework. The research found that, while the practice underpinning coursework had the capacity to support deeper and more independent learning, the pressures of achieving good grades mediated against all pupils reaching the optimum level of higher order thinking.     

Personality Types,Learning Styles and Educational Goals

Attempts to broaden conceptions of learning styles to represent more adequately individual differences in motivation/emotion, as well as cognition, are limited by a paucity of relevant theory. Personality theories should, but do not, provide a satisfactory conceptual framework for this endeavour. In an attempt to remedy this situation, a new personality typology is outlined which, it is argued, provides a coherent system within which to construe and conduct research upon learning styles. The implications of the theory for educational goals, couched in terms of learning styles, also are discussed.     

A hierarchical approach to Students’ Assessments of Instruction

A teacher evaluation system can be threatening to faculty, especially if used for summative decisions. Therefore, it is important to obtain valid and pertinent information. Since students are extensively exposed to course elements, students’ evaluation of instruction should be one of several components in the teacher evaluation system. Since traditional methods, such as Cronbach’s alpha and ordinary least squares regression, do not address the hierarchical data of the classroom, the current study used the statistical techniques of confirmatory factor analysis and hierarchical linear modelling in order to properly investigate the reliability and validity of the Students’ Assessment of Instruction (SAI) instrument. Use of hierarchical linear modelling to analyse teacher evaluation instruments could not be found in the literature, although it has been used in educational settings. This study will illustrate its usefulness in determining what measures are related, either as evidence of validity or as a bias, to instructional effectiveness. Student responses were also compared with faculty self-evaluations, one indicator of effective teaching, in order to determine if the SAI does measure instructional effectiveness. Overall, the SAI was found to have good reliability and validity with relatively few biases and could be used to extract five distinguishable traits of instructional effectiveness.     

Problem-Based Learning for Foundation Computer Science Courses

The foundation courses in computer science pose particular challenges for teacher and learner alike. This paper describes some of these challenges and how we have designed problem-based learning (PBL) courses to address them. We discuss the particular problems we were keen to overcome: the purely technical focus of many courses; the problems of individual learning and the need to establish foundations in a range of areas which are important for computer science graduates. We then outline our course design, showing how we have created problem-based learning courses. The paper reports our evaluation of the approach. This has two parts: assessment of a trial, with a three-year longitudinal follow-up of the students; reports of student learning improve-ment after we had become experienced in full implementation of PBL. We conclude with a summary of our experience over three years of PBL teaching and discuss some of the pragmatic issues around introducing the radical change in teaching, maintaining staff support, and continuing refinement of our PBL teaching. We also discuss some of our approaches to the commonly acknowledged challenges of PBL teaching.     

School engagement and parental involvement: the case of cross-border students in Singapore

The primary purpose of this paper is to examine the mutual relationship between school engagement of cross-border students (CBS) from Malaysia in Singapore and parental involvement in education. Focus-group interviews were conducted with school personnel, CBS and their non-local counterparts to provide a comprehensive understanding of the situation. The cross-border student group comprises diverse ethnicity and most of them are highly competitive and successful in engaging in the whole educational selection process from the beginning to their exit point. This paper argues that education for the CBS represents both a unique socio-cultural phenomenon in the two Asian societies and a manifestation of a widely shared pragmatic value of educational returns. The findings reveal that the nature of CBS engagement with schools is characterized by voluntary assimilation and is rewarded by the meritocratic system of Singapore.     

Individualised educational programmes. Part II: raising the attainment of pupils with special educational needs

This paper is based on an investigation into individualised educational programmes (IEPs). The project, entitled 'Raising the Attainment of Pupils with Special Educational Needs', was commissioned by the Scottish Executive Education Department in 2000 and was completed in 2001. A literature review published previously traces the origins of IEPs and compares and contrasts their use in education systems in the UK, elsewhere in Europe, in the USA and in Australia.     

Strange new world: applying a Bourdieuian lens to understanding early student experiences in higher education

Occupational therapy pre‐registration education stands at the intersection of the fields of health and social care and higher education. UK Government agendas in both fields have seen an increase in the number of students entering with non‐traditional academic backgrounds, a group noted to experience particular challenges in negotiating the transition to, and persisting and succeeding within, higher education. Drawing on data from an ongoing longitudinal case study, a Bourdieuian lens is applied to exploring the early educational experiences of a group of these students during their first year of study and highlights a number of key issues, including the high‐value status of linguistic capital and its relationship to understanding the rules governing practices within the learning environment, the processes via which students manage to adapt to or interestingly, to resist, the dominant culture of the field, and some of the barriers to finding a foothold and legitimate position within the new field.