Dai Hounsell

University of Edinburgh | UoE · Moray House School of Education

The concern of this paper is with small-group discussion in university teaching as a site where feedback is typically generated and communicated to humanities and social sciences students on their everyday learning. The theme is explored by means of a wide-ranging review of the salient literature, considered afresh through the lens of feedback, and...

Purpose This study aimed to evaluate the impact of four cross-institutional teaching enhancement projects (TEPs), a relatively new form of professional collaboration. The focus is on the impact at departmental, institutional and cross-institutional levels because such impact is the main reason for establishing cross-institutional TEPs. Design/meth...

Over the last decade there has been a root-and-branch rethinking of how feedback in university education is conceptualised and practised. Against that transformed landscape, this chapter discusses the distinctive challenges and opportunities that feedback raises at postgraduate level. First and foremost is alertness to the postgraduate 'habits of m...

Implementing teaching enhancement is especially challenging when undertaken on a large-scale and with a range of participating institutions and stakeholders. This study sought to advance understanding of this under-researched area through cultural-historical activity theory, investigating four government-funded, cross-institutional teaching enhance...

Workplaces are complex, dynamic spaces. While some practices are routine and highly predictable, informed by disciplinary and practical knowledge, others are unpredictable and emergent. Outcomes-based education, characterised by standardised, objective measurement of performance under controlled conditions, might be appropriate for routinised pract...

The focus of this chapter is on how to encourage the take-up of advances in assessment and feedback practices across and beyond one university, in ways that can bridge subject and organisational boundaries while avoiding top-down prescription and maintaining respect for scholarly autonomy. Against the wider backdrop of key issues that institutions...

Contemporary research-intensive universities need not only to maintain but also to enhance the quality of their teaching and learning. Diverse strategies are used to raise the quality of teaching and learning, and these typically respond to both institutional and disciplinary cultures. However, there is sometimes a failure to effectively integrate...

This chapter examines the postgraduate learning journeys of three groups of Chinese students through the lens of Master's literacies. For international students such as the, rising to the challenge of their learning journeys entails negotiating an intricate web of transitions, the first and most obvious of which is the identity shift from undergrad...

Written as guidance for teachers and academic managers at the University of Hong Kong and in other comparable universities, this briefing paper draws on a wide range of published sources to review how internationalisation of the curriculum and pedagogy can benefit students' learning.

This Wise Assessment Briefing offers guidelines for giving feedback comments to university students in ways that are most likely to make a difference to the quality of their learning. The focus is on how best to comment on work that has been submitted in full or in part, formally or informally, for evaluation, and whether the comments are handwritt...

A common concern amongst undergraduate and taught postgraduate students is that feedback on their work comes too late to be useful or useable. This Briefing explores how university teachers can 'flip' or reverse that retrospective focus by opting instead to give feedforward, 'real-time' or embedded feedback. To download the appendix to this Wise As...

Within the growing literature on management and leadership in higher education the topic of strategic change in the area of student assessment and feedback has hitherto been the focus of little attention. This paper is a contribution to remedying that gap. First, it reviews the distinctive challenges that assessment and feedback poses because pract...

The paper presents research findings on students’ experiences of the provision both of guidance and feedback, and with respect to examinations as well as coursework assignments. A first‐ and a final‐year bioscience course unit were surveyed in each of three contrasting university departments. The resulting dataset comprised 782 completed student qu...

Most of our students complete most of their written assignments using a word processor, but they are still asked to handwrite responses in an examination. It could be argued that they have not practised this task and the validity of the assessment could thus be questioned. This paper explores the possibility of bringing computers into the tradition...

This article addresses the themes of this special issue by examining the disciplinary dimensions of learning and teaching within undergraduate courses in the areas of biology and history. Key ways of thinking and practising that biology and history lecturers wished to foster in their students are identified. It presents a relational view of the rol...

The concern of this chapter is with research into undergraduate course settings as teaching-learning environments, in which how and what students learn may be subject to a range of direct and indirect influences. The chapter discusses findings from a large-scale ESRC-funded project concerned with the investigation and enhancement of teaching-learni...

The chapter aims to safeguard the long term sustainability of feedback to university students on their progress and performance. This entails ensuring that feedback is a pedagogical resource prized by students and teachers firstly, for its contribution in achieving curriculum aims and learning outcomes; and secondly in equipping students to learn p...

Provides an overview of a large-scale research study of how undergraduate learning and teaching was shaped by subject areas and course settings, together with ways of using research evidence to improve course effectiveness.

The paper presents research findings on students' experiences of the provision both of guidance and feedback, and with respect to examinations as well as coursework assignments. In the work reported, a first- and a final-year bioscience course unit were surveyed in each of three contrasting university departments by means of questionnaires and inte...

Findings are presented from an ongoing study of three final-year, honours-level course units in the biosciences with a combined intake of 85 students. The data on which the analysis draws comprise semi-structured interviews with students together with findings from an Experiences of Teaching and Learning Questionnaire. The investigation forms part...

At the 2003 EARLI Conference in Padova, we presented a symposium paper which discussed the findings of a study of three final-year courses in Biology. While the first part of those findings examined the development by the students of characteristic ways of thinking and practising in biology as a discipline, the second part of the findings highlight...

This handbook is intended to help teachers at the college/university level assess the quality of their teaching in ways that can lead to improvement. It opens with an overview of various sources and methods of feedback likely to be most helpful and then examines how each of a range of approaches to teaching can be systematically reviewed. These inc...

This handbook offers guidance to teachers for obtaining and evaluating feedback on courses and programs of study at institutions of higher education in the United Kingdom and South Africa. Part 1 examines the purposes and functions of feedback, defines key terms, and summarizes key steps in the feedback process. Part 2 discusses the preparation nee...

This inventory, is based on the database derived from Assessment Strategies in Scottish Higher Education (ASSHE) project, a survey of information about changing assessment practices in all 22 Scottish higher educational institutions. Its aims are to spotlight the diversity of assessment strategies and practices, identify core themes and directions,...

This handbook, primarily for new part-time teaching staff at colleges and universities in the United Kingdom, focuses on tutoring and demonstrating teaching skills. Following an introductory chapter, six additional chapters provide an orientation to tutoring and demonstrating. Chapter 2 presents an overview of the roles and responsibilities of new...

First Class Answers in History (Bennett, 1974) is a collection of reflections by seven Cambridge tutors on the characteristics of outstanding essay answers in the University’s final examinations. In his editorial introduction to the volume, Bennett demolishes the notion that there is any “hidden mystery about good history writing” (p. 6). He conten...

In this paper I shall try to explore problems in translating information into practical action. My examples are drawn from education, but my wider concern is with the take-up of information in the professional domain. By this I mean information which is relevant to the quality of professional decision-making processes, and especially where those de...

The chapter reports and discusses the findings of a study of the essay-writing experiences of 17 second-year History undergraduates. The students took part in two sets of semi-structured interviews, each focusing upon a recent essay prepared for a specific course module. The students were invited to describe both the content of the essay and how th...

This chapter sketches out the foundations and implications of an experiential conception of the teaching-learning process, i.e. a conception which is steeped in the experiences and perspectives of both academics and students. The chapter aims to highlight main themes which spring from the findings discussed in earlier chapters, to suggest what thes...

Undergraduate students are commonly advised to make plans of their essays before they begin writing, yet there is little empirical evidence on the nature, role or efficacy of essay planning. This paper examines findings from a recent study of coursework essay‐writing as an aspect of student learning in the social sciences. A total of 16 Psychology...

Dimensions which have been used to describe various aspects of studying are reviewed. These draw attention to three distinctive approaches to studying which contain elements of both study processes and motivation. The development of an inventory of approaches to studying is reported which confirmed the importance of these three dimensions, but also...

This paper is concerned with systematic attempts to help students to learn more effectively. Current approaches to learning-to-learn, chiefly in Britain and involving groups rather than individuals, are reviewed against the background of recent research findings on student learning. Four issues are identified and discussed: contrasting conceptions...

The results of a survey are reported in two parts: (1) the compilation of an annotated inventory of recurrent secondary services in education produced in the United Kingdom--abstracting, indexing, and current awareness services; and (2) detailed analyses of the important characteristics of timelag, coverage, physical format, and entry format in the...

This guide for teachers to the tape indexing system (TANDEM) in use at the Modern Languages Department at Portsmouth Polytechnic focuses on tape classification, numbering, labeling, and shelving system procedures. The appendixes contain information on: (1) the classification system and related codes, (2) color and letter codes, (3) marking of tape...

This paper draws on empirical findings from a large-scale, cross-institutional research project to highlight some distinctive teaching-learning challenges of first-year undergraduate courses, particularly in comparison to final-year courses. In many U21 universities, such first-year courses typically have larger and more diverse student enrolments...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/42836/1/10734_2004_Article_BF00153955.pdf