David Boud

Deakin University · Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly disrupted traditional methods of teaching and learning within higher education. But what remained when the pandemic passed? While the majority of the literature explores the shifts during the pandemic, with much speculation about post-pandemic futures, a clear understanding of lasting implications remains elusive...

Feedback can be powerful, but its effects are dependent on what students do. There has been intensive research in recent years under the banner of ‘feedback literacy’ to understand how to help students make the most of feedback. Although there are instruments to measure feedback literacy, they largely measure perceptions and orientations rather tha...

Effective learning depends on effective feedback, which in turn requires a set of skills, dispositions and practices on the part of both students and teachers which have been termed feedback literacy. A previously published teacher feedback literacy competency framework has identified what is needed by teachers to implement feedback well. While thi...

Peer learning is an umbrella term covering diverse strategies supporting students to learn from each other. Studies highlight the power of combining two intertwined models of peer learning, namely peer assessment/feedback and collaborative team-based learning, to prepare graduates for the world of work and encourage acceptable social behaviours. Ne...

Summative assessment is often considered a motivator that drives students’ learning. Higher education has a responsibility in promoting lifelong learning and assessment plays an important role in supporting students’ capability to make evaluative judgements about their work and that of others. However, as research often focuses on formal pedagogica...

Transcripts and testamurs serve to confirm the award of a degree but offer limited information on what a student can actually do. This conceptual paper considers the problem of how graduate achievements are represented by universities in typically reductive and limited ways that do not enable student achievements and distinctiveness to be communica...

Based on the self-system processes model of motivation, we explored the mediating role of academic self-concept in the relationship between perseverance of effort and self-assessment. The results showed that perseverance of effort has a positive but not statistically significant association with self-assessment when controlling academic self-concep...

Student feedback literacy has been the subject of much conceptual literature; however, relatively little intervention research has investigated how and if it can be developed. Further, no evaluation of the current empirical literature has been conducted to assess which elements of feedback literacy can be successfully improved in practice, and whic...

This paper investigates how 192 trainees' self-assessment practices and personal attributes related to their success in an online interview training program. Performance was measured pre-and post-training by evaluating the use of open-ended questions and positive interviewing behaviors. Personal data and a pre-training survey on self-assessment pra...

Background Assessment is an essential part of aphasia management. There are many tools available for aphasia assessment, but relatively scant attention has been paid to how speech pathologists carry out their assessment sessions, or how these sessions are experienced by people with aphasia and their families. The evidence that is available suggests...

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is proliferating in university courses across many countries. Like many educational practices, students’ experience of it is shaped by the assessment processes adopted. Does assessment support or inhibit what WIL seeks to foster? To explore how students experience assessment in WIL, a small-scale investigation was und...

Public health edicts necessitated by COVID-19 prompted a rapid pivot to remote online teaching and learning. Two major consequences followed: households became students’ main learning space, and technology became the sole medium of instructional delivery. We use the ideas of “digital disconnect” and “digital divide” to examine, for students and fac...

There is a general tension between the individualised nature of current assessment practices in higher education and a collaborative approach to learning. This results in many dilemmas for educators as they try to balance academic integrity concerns and student preferences with social or collaborative assessment practices, including peer assessment...

Assessment has multiple purposes, one of which is to judge if students have met outcomes at the requisite level. Underperformance in assessment is frequently positioned as a problem of the student and attributed to student diversity and/or background characteristics. However, the assessment might also be inequitable and therefore exclude students i...

How did the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic impact student learning in higher education? Everywhere, Sars-CoV-2 struck hardest in the most disadvantaged communities. This paper asks whether the virus's disproportionate effect on more vulnerable groups is replicated among college and university students. Data come from approximately 3800 students stu...

There is growing agreement that feedback should be understood as a contextual and social process, rather than as receipt of teacher comments on students’ work. This reframing brings with it new complexities, and it can be challenging for researchers and practitioners to adopt a process perspective when making sense of feedback practices in naturali...

To understand how the digitalization of higher education influences the inter-relationship between students, teachers, and their broader contexts, research must account for the social, cultural, political, and embodied aspects of teaching and learning in digital environments. Digital ethnography is a research method that can generate rich contextua...

Predictions about the post‐pandemic future of digital learning vary among higher education scholars. Some foresee dramatic, revolutionary change while others speculate that growth in educational technology will be buffeted both by modest expansion and unevenness. To this debate we contribute evidence from four groups across six countries on four co...

Student feedback practices have been primarily discussed within a context of the particular course or unit of study. Little attention has been paid to how students navigate their feedback practices as they progress through different learning contexts and whether they apply known feedback strategies in new settings. To open exploration of this issue...

The joint development and delivery of co-branded programmes across universities and countries promises enhanced visibility for partnering institutions, stimulating synergistic collegial relationships for teachers, and expanded opportunities for students to access a wider range of courses enhanced by a broader range of international expertise. At th...

It has been suggested for many years that students who are able to judge their own performance should do well in academic assessments. Despite the increasing number of empirical studies investigating the effect of self-assessment on academic performance, there has not been a recent synthesis of findings in the higher education context. The current...

Purpose Investigative interviewers assess their colleagues' interviews (‘peer review’) as a necessary part of their practice, and for their self-development. Yet, there is little guidance around what the process involves and how they might do it. Research suggests that effective peer review is supported by using guidance material. The goal of the p...

Those entering a new workplace often come with knowledge and skills relevant to the job they are employed to do; however, there will be site-based practices that they are unfamiliar with. Most of the learning about ‘how we do things around here’ occurs after a new role is commenced. This is certainly the case with novice Vocational Education and Tr...

Learning is not just determined by the curriculum, but by how it is assessed. This article focuses on the analysis of the role played by the quality of assessment tasks on learning in undergraduate courses. During two successive academic years, information was collected on the views of students on the assessment activities and practices that they h...

Feedback is justified when it has a positive influence on students’ subsequent performance. Opportunities for student action need therefore to be consciously designed if feedback is to influence learning. In this paper, we discuss how ipsative design of feedback processes, i.e. involving comparison of a student’s current performance with a previous...

COVID-19 has had a profound influence on the conduct of teaching and learning in higher education. Almost everywhere a sudden shift occurred as educators transitioned courses from mainly face-to-face teaching and learning to emergency remote instruction, mostly conducted online. While details varied for individual faculty members, institutions, and...

Academic failure is commonplace in higher education. Some students persist and go on to complete their courses. However, some do not, and this can create problems for themselves and the institutions in which they are enrolled. If we could understand students’ lived experiences of academic failure and persistence, it may be possible to design strate...

Technologies associated with online learning have led to many new feedback practices and expanded the meaning of feedback beyond the traditional focus on instructor comments, but conceptual work on online feedback has not followed. This paper investigates how online learning researchers understand feedback's role in teaching and learning, and discu...

Recent growth in research on feedback has focussed on the importance of developing student feedback literacy. That is, the capabilities students need to make good use of feedback processes. To date there have been few investigations of how ideas about student feedback literacy can be translated into course design. This paper therefore examines stud...

Recent feedback literature emphasises the active role of learners in feedback processes and a programmatic approach to feedback design. This conceptual paper argues for the importance of ipsative processes, i.e. processes focusing on learners’ progress as a mechanism in meeting these two requirements. It suggests that the iterative nature of ipsati...

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) have become ubiquitous as a form of assessment in medical education but involve substantial resource demands and considerable local variation. A detailed understanding of the processes by which OSCEs are designed and administered could improve feasibility and sustainability. This exploration of OSC...

The increasing prominence of neoliberal agendas in international higher education has led to greater weight being ascribed to student satisfaction, and the national surveys through which students evaluate courses of study. In this article, we focus on the evaluation of feedback processes. Rather than the transmission of information from teacher to...

If feedback is to be conducted effectively, then there needs to be clarity about what is involved and what is necessary for teachers to be able to undertake it well. While much attention has recently been devoted to student feedback literacy, less has been given to what is required of teaching staff in their various roles in feedback processes. Thi...

Feedback is a term used so frequently that it is commonly taken that there is a shared view about what it means. However, in recent years, the notion of feedback as simply the provision of information to students about their work has been substantially challenged and learning-centred views have been articulated. This paper employs a corpus linguist...

The current study tested the effectiveness of a compact (18 hour) and blended (involving online and face-to-face components) training course, adapted from a previously evaluated course found to be successful in fostering long-term change in interviewing skill. The compact course was developed by trimming the previous course to only include learning...

Despite feedback being considered important to learning, its potential is rarely fully realised. Promoting learning through feedback in open-ended written tasks (e.g. essays and reports) is a complex endeavour that requires students who are motivated to identify and utilise appropriate information. We set out to understand the mechanisms that enabl...

Student agency is often mentioned as a key feature of feedback practices. Commonly, the concept of agency is used to refer to students' active role in the process of seeking, receiving, generating and acting upon feedback information. However, the notion of what student agency means is often taken for granted and rarely elaborated. The feedback lit...

The rush to short courses and use of micro-credentials prompted by responses to the pandemic has greatly accelerated a trend already underway. However, few studies have examined the impact of short courses or micro-credentials on skills or employment outcomes, and this hasty move draws attention to major problems in the ways in which higher educati...

Universities might aspire to teaching excellence, but do they enable academic teachers to make good teaching decisions? Using a critical realist perspective, a qualitative interview study in England and Australia explored academics’ experiences of teaching decisions and their responses to strategic, institutional and departmental teaching policy an...

Background The use of mock interviews (also known as role play), particularly using trained actors as interviewees, has demonstrated positive effects on communication training but little is known about how learners engage with these practice activities. Objective The current study was conducted to determine what perceptions forensic interviewers h...

Assessment exists within a series of pedagogical, administrative and technological legacy practices. It tends therefore to reflect the needs and concerns of a previous time. However, this does not align with a digitally enabled world with rapidly expanding information and an increasingly dynamic view of knowledge. This chapter explores how to reima...

Graduates must learn to present a version of themselves that aligns with the expectations and norms of their discipline or profession, organisations in which they might work and the public at large; and to be able to adapt as they change careers and workplaces. Persona studies offers a lens for reimagining more authentic forms of assessment design,...

The article “Toward a Pedagogy for Professional Noticing: Learning through Observation”, written by Donna Rooney and David Boud, was originally published Online First without Open Access.

How can students' competence be developed through peer assessment? This paper focuses on how relevant variables such as participation, evaluative judgement and the quality of the assessment interact and influence peer assessment. From an analysis of 4 years of data from undergraduate classes in project management, it develops a model of causal rela...

¿Podemos estar seguros de que la evaluación en la educación superior satisface la necesidad de desarrollar y garantizar resultados de aprendizaje de alta calidad? La evaluación actual es típicamente una colección de prácticas convencionales que nunca han sido seriamente cuestionadas. Hace diez años, como parte de un proyecto nacional, representante...

The pending challenge of assessment in higher education, although also at other educational levels, continues to be its effective link with student learning. Students' strategic learning could and should be achieved by the assessment. This paper arises from the attempt to answer the question about what would be the future of assessment in higher ed...

El reto pendiente de la evaluación en educación superior, aunque también en otros niveles, sigue siendo su vinculación efectiva con el aprendizaje de los estudiantes. A través de la evaluación se puede y debe conseguir un aprendizaje estratégico del estudiantado. Esta aportación surge a partir del intento de dar respuesta al interrogante sobre cuál...

The pending challenge of assessment in higher education, although also at other educational levels, continues to be its effective link with student learning. Students' strategic learning could and should be achieved by the assessment. This paper arises from the attempt to answer the question about what would be the future of assessment in higher ed...

In contemporary higher education systems, the processes of assessment and feedback are often seen as coexisting activities. As a result, they have become entangled in both policy and practice, resulting in a conceptual and practical blurring of their unique purposes. In this paper, we present a critical examination of the issues created by the enta...

Self-assessment is a fundamental skill for professionals because self-assessment can promote self-regulated learning and professional development. However, studies reporting the use of self-assessment instruments in the professional training context are scarce. This study aimed to re-evaluate the psychometric properties of the Self-assessment Pract...

Doctoral education aims to benefit those who undertake it, but does it exert a wider influence? Professional doctorates are commonly designed to have an impact beyond the individual concerned, but is this influence realised? This article focuses on a collaborative enquiry by a group of academics and doctoral alumni from non-discipline-specific prof...

Recent feedback literature suggests that the development of student feedback literacy has potential to address problems in current feedback practice. Students’ feedback literacy involves developing the capacity to make the most of feedback opportunities by active involvement in feedback processes. How the development of student feedback literacy ca...

While there is now extensive research on informal feedback seeking behaviour by employees in organisations, this literature has received limited attention in higher education. This paper addresses the gap between the two fields of feedback literacy and feedback seeking behaviour. Key organisational feedback seeking behaviour concepts including empl...

PLEASE NOTE WE ARE UNABLE TO SHARE THE FULL TEXT OF THIS BOOK This textbook for reflective teachers in higher education is written by an international team of experts in teaching and learning in higher education and is informed by the latest research in this area. It offers extensive support for those at the start of an academic career and career-...

ABSTRACT Tests and examinations are widely used internationally. Despite their pervasiveness, they tend to measure lower order thinking skills in a decontextualized manner at a time when the literature frequently argues for the benefits of a richer, authentic approach to assessment. The focus of this paper is to improve authenticity in test assessm...

This book is the first to explore the big question of how assessment can be refreshed and redesigned in an evolving digital landscape. There are many exciting possibilities for assessments that contribute dynamically to learning. However, the interface between assessment and technology is limited. Often, assessment designers do not take advantage o...

jats:p>El reto pendiente de la evaluación en educación superior, aunque también en otros niveles, sigue siendo su vinculación efectiva con el aprendizaje de los estudiantes. A través de la evaluación se puede y debe conseguir un aprendizaje estratégico del estudiantado. Esta aportación surge a partir del intento de dar respuesta al interrogante sob...

Ensuring student success has long been on the research agenda in higher education. In this study, we seek to understand if the changes students make in light of academic failure are consistent with this literature. Little is known about students who fail but subsequently persist in their studies. Through an online survey with students who had faile...

Universities have responded to the expansion of higher education and restructuring of the labour market by redesigning curriculum to better emphasise transferable skills and embed pedagogies that contribute to graduate employability. However, the ways in which universities judge and share achievement still provides poor evidence of what students ca...

This paper offers a critical and theoretical exploration of the contemporary use of standards in assessment in higher education. It outlines three discourses of assessment standards. Each perspective foregrounds particular realities and backgrounds others, and so influences practice in particular taken-for-granted ways. The assumptions of these per...

Academic failure is an important and personal event in the lives of university students, and the ways they make sense of experiences of failure matters for their persistence and future success. Academic failure contributes to attrition, yet the extent of this contribution and precipitating factors of failure are not well understood. To illuminate t...

Despite an increasing focus on assessment feedback, educators continue to find that simply replicating an effective feedback practice from one context does not guarantee success in the next. There is a growing recognition that the contextual factors surrounding successful practices need to be considered. This article reports on a large-scale mixed...

A necessary skill that underpins all professional practice is noticing that which is salient. Noticing can be learned directly and indirectly through a variety of campus-based and placement activities. This paper suggests that developing a capacity for noticing is under conceptualised and underdeveloped in courses preparing students for the profess...

There is an increasing focus on notions of feedback in which students are positioned as active players rather than recipients of information. These discussions have been either conceptual in character or have an empirical focus on designs to support learners in feedback processes. There has been little emphasis on learners’ perspectives on, and exp...

This chapter offers a useful overview of the purpose, development and structure of this book on feedback impact. It begins by touching on the reason for this book and then provides an outline of the process of how the editors and authors worked together to break new ground. We then explain the structure of the book—describing the five parts: feedba...

This chapter focuses on influences, affordances and challenges for teachers in designing for (and identifying) feedback impact. We propose four key questions that need to be asked: Do learners know the purpose of feedback and their role(s) in it? Can learners make sense of the information? Can learners take action? What effects should we be looking...

This chapter discusses researching feedback inputs and processes to examine effects. Specifically, we promote a research agenda that contributes an understanding of how feedback works, for particular learners, in particular circumstances through research designs that take account of theory, occur in naturalistic settings and focus on students’ sens...

This chapter offers new insight regarding the theoretical, methodological and practical concerns relating to feedback in higher education. It begins with the construction of a new definition of feedback. We explain how feedback is a learner-centred process in which impact is a core feature. The chapter then explores the reasons why identifying, let...

Feedback can occur before and after assessment submission, but needs to be useful in order for students to improve their subsequent performance. Arguably, undergraduate students, and particularly international, online and new students, are especially in need of feedback to effectively engage in academic and disciplinary expectations. Therefore, thi...

This chapter has a particular focus on the observers’ role in simulation-based learning activities. Simulation-based learning is often organised so that participants rotates between active participation in the scenario and participation as observers. The research examples provided show that the conditions for learning are related to the locations w...

Work-integrated learning (WIL) is a feature of university courses, both in professional areas, where it is commonplace, but also across many different disciplines. Assessment of WIL can be complex as it involves parties and settings external to the university, and it can be problematic because of difficulties in aligning learning activities during...

Winstone and Boud critique the concept of a singular student voice in the context of students’ experiences of assessment and feedback, arguing that the wording of many items in student experience surveys send the message that it is the transmission of comments, rather than the impact of feedback on student learning, that is important. Instead, they...

The accuracy and consistency of peer marking, particularly when students have the power to reward (or penalise) during formative and summative assessment regimes, is largely unknown. The objective of this study is to evaluate students’ ability and behaviour in marking their peers’ teamwork performance in a collaborative group assessment context bot...

A crucial determinant of the success or failure of collaborative group work is the effect of peer feedback interventions on learning. Research exploring such effects on developing soft skills is sparse. This study seeks to address whether peer feedback leads to enhanced teamwork behaviour and self-assessment ability, two skills highly sought after...

This book asks how we might conceptualise, design for and evaluate the impact of feedback in higher education. Ultimately, the purpose of feedback is to improve what students can do: therefore, effective feedback must have impact. Students need to be actively engaged in seeking, sense-making and acting upon any information provided to them in order...

Recently, the concept of evaluative judgement has gained attention as a pedagogical approach to classroom formative assessment practices. Evaluative judgement is the capacity to be able to judge the work of oneself and that of others, which implies developing knowledge about one’s own assessment capability. A focus on evaluative judgement helps us...

Students’ capacity for making evaluative judgements of their own work is widely acknowledged as central to their learning within programmes as well as being vital to their subsequent professional practice. In higher education literature, the act of evaluative judgement is usually portrayed as a process of deliberative, analytical reasoning requirin...