Phillip Dawson

• PhD
• Co-Director at Deakin University

Bring-your-own-device electronic examinations (BYOD e-exams) are a relatively new type of assessment where students sit an in-person exam under invigilated conditions with their own laptop. Special software restricts student access to prohibited computer functions and files, and provides access to any resources or software the examiner approves. In...

‘Rubric’ is a term with a variety of meanings. As the use of rubrics has increased both in research and practice, the term has come to represent divergent practices. These range from secret scoring sheets held by teachers to holistic student-developed articulations of quality. Rubrics are evaluated, mandated, embraced and resisted based on often im...

ABSTRACTWhen researchers selectively report significant positive results, and omit non-significant or negative results, the published literature skews in a particular direction. This is called ?reporting bias?, and it can cause both casual readers and meta-analysts to develop an inaccurate understanding of the efficacy of an intervention. This pape...

Contract cheating occurs when students outsource assessed work. In this study, we asked experienced markers from four disciplines to detect contract cheating in a set of 20 discipline-specific assignments. We then conducted a training workshop to improve their detection accuracy, and afterwards asked them to detect contract cheating in 20 new assig...

Whilst contemporary ideas of feedback provide multiple insights into how feedback should be processed and enacted by students in a recipient role, little attention has been paid to understand what it takes for students to provide effective feedback to others. This conceptual paper draws on literature from peer feedback and feedback literacy to expl...

As higher education grapples with ensuring assessment validity in an increasingly AI-populated time, institutions and educators are working to establish appropriate boundaries for AI use. However, little is known about how students and teachers conceptualize and experience these boundaries in practice. This study investigates how students and teach...

Feedback has a powerful impact on student learning (Hattie & Timperley, 2007). Although it has now become an essential component of higher education courses, learning how to receive and provide feedback can be difficult, as evidenced by dissatisfaction in student surveys on a global scale (e.g., MacKay et al., 2019). Carless and Boud (2018) argue t...

Feedback literacy has been identified as a key capability to promote in higher education, such that individuals can make the most of the imperfect feedback situations they find themselves in, both within their studies and the world beyond – work and life inclusive, and increasingly digital. Recent attention has turned to interventions that can impr...

Following the COVID-19 pandemic, higher education teachers, having transitioned to new teaching methodologies, including online learning and modified assessment strategies, face the question: Do they intend to revert to pre-pandemic ways of operating or retain their new practices? A university-wide invitation with an incentive resulted in 63 academ...

Authentic assessment is often positioned as an educational panacea, invoked in response to a broad range of complex problems. This paper considers authentic assessment in relation to three key challenges: preparing graduates for the future, cheating, and inclusion. Despite literature supporting its potential benefits, there is limited evidence on t...

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...

Educators set restrictions in examinations to enable them to assess learning outcomes under particular conditions. The open book versus closed book binary is an example of the sorts of restrictions examiners have traditionally set. In the late 2000s this was expanded to a trinary to include open web examinations. However, the current technology env...

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...

(a) The aim of this chapter is to present a historical account of feedback conceptualizations and discuss current trends in feedback research and practice. (b) The main concepts show that many definitions of feedback exist which have influenced research and practice, shifting from feedback as information, to feedback as a process that foregrounds t...

A myriad of ideas abound about how to deter or detect contract cheating in higher education. Assessment design is one key strategy academics can consider in terms of deterring contract cheating by their students. This chapter considers the types of assessment that students say they prefer, enjoy, and find most useful, as well as those they say they...

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...

The Scholarship of Technology Enhanced Learning, and the Scholarship of Learning and Teaching more broadly, tends to focus on positive stories of things that work (Dawson & Dawson, 2018). We have an interest in learning and want to share strategies we have found to be successful. A similar parallel can be drawn with the field of academic integrity,...

Feedback is powerful for learning in education, and the workplace. Work-integrated learning bridges these two settings, but how prepared students are to use feedback strategies as they enter the workplace remains unknown. This paper documents an exploratory, mixed-methods, study involving final-year occupational therapy students. The students were...

Increasing pressure is being placed on governments and legislators in different countries to take action against assignment outsourcing in higher education. Global discussions focus on prohibiting commercial outsourcing providers, such as contract cheating services. Despite evidence to suggest that outsourcing behaviours by students are increasing,...

Flipped classroom has become a popular buzzword in the post-secondary education setting, and it is one of the most visible trends in smart learning environments. Alongside this popularisation comes the view that the flipped classroom is something desirable. Yet, many educators remain divided over whether flipped classroom is really an improvement o...

The use of meta-analyses has become increasingly widespread in flipped classroom research. They are typically seen as a more objective and credible method of summarizing the effects of the flipped classroom approach. However, problems among meta-analyses are long-standing and widespread, and can undermine the credibility of the results. This paper...

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...

In the business disciplines, there is a disconnection between what employers expect graduates to do and what graduates are actually able to do. Limited research has been done on the interfaces of professionals’ aspirations, university instructors’ enactment, and university learners’ experiences. To address this well-felt gap, we conducted a series...

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...

When students graduate, they cannot rely on educators telling them if their work is good enough. To do so, they need well-developed evaluative judgement, the capability to make decisions about the quality of their own and the work of others. There is little evidence about the specific approaches that can develop evaluative judgement—or how to study...

Objective To evaluate the hypothesis that a perinatal educational dietary intervention focused on ‘eating for the gut microbiota’ improves diet quality of pregnant women pre- and postnatally. Design The Healthy Parents, Healthy Kids study is a prospectively registered randomised controlled trial designed to evaluate the efficacy of a dietary inter...

This chapter outlines three possible implications of the ideas explored in Reimagining University Assessment in a Digital World. These are: a renewed focus on the future; the changing nature of teachers’ assessment work in a digital world; and new ways of thinking about scalability.

Cognitive offloading refers to using tools like notes, calculators or spellcheckers to reduce the cognitive demands of a task. Assessment has a patchy history in attending to cognitive offloading. In some settings, such as exams, there are explicit rules that relate to cognitive offloading, such as the allowance or prohibition of textbooks and note...

Every day we see the emergence of new technologies. And every day we see a widening gap between progress and society’s ability to cope with its consequences. Klaus Schwab (2016)

Students' performance prediction is a crucial task in todays online education. Recently, many machine learning models have been designed to couple students' online activities with their academic performance. However, it is difficult for these models to effectively make prediction due to the excessive difference in feature selection. While in most c...

How can learners be supported to engage productively in the kinds of feedback practices they may encounter after they graduate? This article introduces a novel concept of authentic feedback to denote processes which resemble the feedback practices of the discipline, profession or workplace. Drawing on the notion of authentic assessment, a framework...

Students use various licit and illicit substances to enhance their academic performance. As yet, no study has explored whether this is an issue of concern for those working in the higher education sector. This study aimed to explore study drug policy, regulatory environments and responses within Australian universities. Semi-structured interviews w...

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...

Respect plays a crucial role in maintaining feedback interactions and sustaining student engagement with feedback. However, previous feedback literature has only mentioned respect in anecdotal accounts, and as a uni-dimensional notion. Drawing upon the philosophical distinctions among kinds of respect, this conceptual paper argues that respect is m...

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...

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...

Contract cheating happens when students outsource their assessed work to a third party. One approach that has been suggested for improving contract cheating detection is comparing students’ assignment submissions with their previous work, the rationale being that changes in style may indicate a piece of work has been written by somebody else. This...

This chapter argues that researchers must look beyond narrow and simple notions of feedback impact in educational practice. It draws comparisons with what has occurred within student engagement research. This illustrates the challenges of researching a phenomenon that lacks conceptual clarity and hence gives rise to a range of contradictory measure...

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...

First-year university students' underdeveloped academic literacies can lead to dissatisfaction and poor performance. University teachers find it difficult to take action without an understanding of students' perceptions and needs. This study investigates first-year Chinese students' perceptions and experiences related to assessment of academic lite...

BACKGROUND The early life gut microbiota are an important regulator of the biological pathways contributing towards the pathogenesis of non-communicable disease. It is unclear whether improvements to perinatal diet quality could alter the infant gut microbiota. OBJECTIVE To assess the efficacy of a perinatal educational dietary intervention in inf...

Background: The early life gut microbiota are an important regulator of the biological pathways contributing toward the pathogenesis of noncommunicable disease. It is unclear whether improvements to perinatal diet quality could alter the infant gut microbiota. Objective: The aim of this study is to assess the efficacy of a perinatal educational...

Contract cheating happens when students commission someone else to do assessed work for them. While it is already illegal in 18 jurisdictions, others are considering making the provision of contract cheating services illegal. To date, legal approaches to addressing contract cheating have faced little scrutiny in the peer reviewed literature. This a...

Increasing significance has been ascribed to student engagement, as a measure of success of both teachers and programs. However, since users of the term commonly tend not to explain, rationalise or problematise their understanding of engagement, its value to understand or transform learning may be limited. While clarification has occurred in concep...

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...

Developing leadership in students is part of the remit of higher education institutions. In recent decades, student leadership development programs have proliferated at universities worldwide. However, the contested understanding of the term ‘leadership’ has resulted in lack of clarity regarding how this may be ‘developed’ in higher education. Ther...

Evaluative judgement is the capability to make decisions about the quality of work of oneself and others. In this paper, we propose that developing students’ evaluative judgement should be a goal of higher education, to enable students to improve their work and to meet their future learning needs: a necessary capability of graduates. We explore eva...

Feedback practices represent a significant investment in resources and emotion for educators and students. While there are pockets of excellence, research continues to highlight that feedback practices cannot be simply parachuted from one context to another and be expected to work just as effectively. This paper presents twelve underlying condition...

This chapter provides a synthesis of recent research into how technology can support effective feedback. It begins by adopting a definition of feedback in line with recent advances in feedback research. Rather than viewing feedback as mere information provision, feedback is viewed as an active process that students undertake using information from...

A key skill to be mastered by graduates today is the ability to assess the quality of their own work, and the work of others. This book demonstrates how the higher education system might move away from a culture of unhelpful grades and rigid marking schemes, to focus instead on forms of feedback and assessment that develop the critical skills of it...

Since the early 2010s the literature has shifted to view feedback as a process that students do where they make sense of information about work they have done, and use it to improve the quality of their subsequent work. In this view, effective feedback needs to demonstrate effects. However, it is unclear if educators and students share this underst...

This chapter brings recent critical thought from the field of educational technology to bear on the challenge of scaling up Assessment for Learning (AfL). Three different types of ‘scaling up’ are presented, illustrated through three different ‘technology-enhanced’ AfL approaches. Recent advances in providing feedback through audio, video and scree...

The term ‘peer assessment’ may apply to a range of student activities. This imprecision may impact on the uptake of peer assessment pedagogies. To better describe peer assessment approaches, typologies of peer assessment diversity were previously derived from the education literature. However, these typologies have not yet been tested with ‘real-li...

There are dissonances between educators’ aspirations for assessment design and actual assessment implementation in higher education. Understanding how assessment is designed ‘on the ground’ can assist in resolving this tension. Thirty-three Australian university educators from a mix of disciplines and institutions were interviewed. A thematic analy...

Despite compelling evidence of its potential effectiveness, uptake of self and peer assessment in higher education has been slower than expected. As with other assessment practices, self and peer assessment is ultimately enabled, or inhibited, by the actions of individual academics. This paper explores what academics see as the benefits and challen...

Contract cheating is the purchasing of custom-made university assignments with the intention of submitting them. Websites providing contract cheating services often claim this form of cheating is undetectable, and no published research has examined this claim. This paper documents a pilot study where markers were paid to mark a mixture of real stud...

Students enrolled in university courses often lack knowledge of potential jobs and career paths they can take, which can inhibit their ability to plan, job seek and make decisions about their careers, and negatively impact on their ability to gain employment. To address this problem we developed and piloted a tailored, career-focused interactive on...

This paper explores challenges and opportunities in self and peer assessment and its relationship with educational technologies that support the implementation of the assessment in Higher Educational contexts. While self and peer assessment offer a range of learning opportunities which may lead to enhanced learning outcomes, designing and implement...

Despite widespread recognition of the need to improve assessment in higher education, assessment tasks in individual courses are too often dominated by conventional methods. While changing assessment depends on many factors, improvements to assessment ultimately depend on the decisions and actions of individual educators. This paper considers resea...

One of the promises of big data in higher education (learning analytics) is being able to accurately identify and assist students who may not be engaging as expected. These expectations, distilled into parameters for learning analytics tools, can be determined by human teacher experts or by algorithms themselves. However, there has been little work...

Assessment as a field of investigation has been influenced by a limited number of perspectives. These have focused assessment research in particular ways that have emphasised measurement, or student learning or institutional policies. The aim of this paper is to view the phenomenon of assessment from a practice perspective drawing upon ideas from p...

A wide range of technologies has been developed to enhance assessment, but adoption has been inconsistent. This is despite assessment being critical to student learning and certification. To understand why this is the case and how it can be addressed, we need to explore the perspectives of academics responsible for designing and implementing techno...