Marking (in)consistency – the elephant in the assessment room?

In a thought-provoking article, available online ahead of publication in the February 2012 edition of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, Teresa McConlogue looks into the pedagogical benefits of peer assessment. Her paper But is it fair? Developing students’ understanding of grading complex written work through peer assessment focuses on work conducted with engineering students at [...]

Involving alumni in careers education

The December 2011 edition of Bioscience Education included an account I wrote concerning our Careers After Biological Science (CABS) programme at the University of Leicester. The CABS series of careers talks was started in 2007. Since 2009 it has been supported and enhanced by the Bioscience careers blog which includes copies of the slides used [...]

An instrument to evaluate Assessment for Learning

Assessment for Learning (AfL) has been a key notion in recent curriculum developments in both secondary and tertiary education (see this link for previous left-handed biochemist posts on AfL). The December 2011 edition of Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education featured a paper Does assessment for learning make a difference? The development of a questionnaire [...]

Institutional repositories, social media and academic publication: a simple experiment

Over at Science of the Invisible, my colleague Alan Cann has been reflecting on the contemporary landscape within academic publication. Specifically, he’s been thinking aloud about the role played by institutional repositories alongside (or, more radically, instead of) more formal journal publication (for example, see Wit’s End, which links in turn to Melissa Terras’ post What [...]