Assessment innovation and student experience: a new assessment challenge and call for a multi-perspective approach to assessment research

The impact of innovative assessment on student experience in higher education is a neglected research topic. This represents an important gap in the literature given debate around the marketization of higher education, international focus on student satisfaction measurement tools and political calls to put students at the heart of higher education in the UK. This paper reports on qualitative findings from a research project examining the impact of assessment preferences and familiarity on student attainment and experience. It argues that innovation is defined by the student, shaped by diverse assessment experiences and preferences and therefore its impact is difficult to predict. It proposes that future innovations must explore assessment choice mechanisms which allow students to shape their own assessments. Cultural change and staff development will be required to achieve this. To be accepted, assessment for student experience must be viewed as a complementary layer within a complex multi perspective model of assessment which also embraces assessment of learning, assessment for learning and assessment for life long learning. Further research is required to build a meta theory of assessment to enhance the synergies between these alternative approaches and to minimise tensions between them

Why do less creative student writers write longer texts?

When teaching academic writing in English the issue of creativity understood as experimenting, exploring and transforming language and ideas within the required writing task while keeping the audience and purpose in mind is rarely, if ever, considered. Still, there seems to be a relationship between the creative potential of a writer and the quality and quantity of their writing. The main aim of this article is to ponder upon the results of a small scale study on the relationship between students’ creativity as measured by KANH questionnaire and their lexical fluency in academic writing. The results seem to suggest that student writers who appear less creative write longer texts. The author discusses possible reasons for such a case, finding answers in research on creativity as such and creativity in writing specifically

ECONOMICS OF INNOVATION The Effects of Prize Structures on Innovative Performance

Successful innovation is essential for the survival and growth of organizations, but how best to incentivize innovation is poorly understood. We compare how two common incentive schemes affect innovative performance in a field experiment run in partnership with a large life sciences company. We find that a winner-takes-all compensation scheme generates significantly more novel innovation relative to a compensation scheme that offers the same total compensation but shares it across the ten best innovations. Moreover, the winner-takes-all scheme does not reduce innovative output on average and, among teams of innovators, generates more output than the less risky prize structure

Taxonomic classification of planning decisions in health care: a review of the state of the art in OR/MS

We provide a structured overview of the typical decisions to be made in resource capacity planning and control in health care, and a review of relevant OR/MS articles for each planning decision. The contribution of this paper is twofold. First, to position the planning decisions, a taxonomy is presented. This taxonomy provides health care managers and OR/MS researchers with a method to identify, break down and classify planning and control decisions. Second, following the taxonomy, for six health care services, we provide an exhaustive specification of planning and control decisions in resource capacity planning and control. For each planning and control decision, we structurally review the key OR/MS articles and the OR/MS methods and techniques that are applied in the literature to support decision making

The Effects of the Louisiana Scholarship Program on Student Achievement After Two Years

The Louisiana Scholarship Program (LSP) is a statewide initiative offering publicly-funded vouchers to enroll in local private schools to students in low-performing schools with family income no greater than 250 percent of the poverty line. Initially established in 2008 as a pilot program in New Orleans, the LSP was expanded statewide in 2012. This paper examines the experimental effects of using an LSP scholarship to enroll in a private school on student achievement in the first two years following the program’s expansion. Our results indicate that the use of an LSP scholarship has negatively impacted both ELA and math achievement, although only the latter estimates are statistically significant. Moreover, we observe less negative effect estimates in the second year of the program

Synergistic Team Composition

Effective teams are crucial for organisations, especially in environments that require teams to be constantly created and dismantled, such as software development, scientific experiments, crowd-sourcing, or the classroom. Key factors influencing team performance are competences and personality of team members. Hence, we present a computational model to compose proficient and congenial teams based on individuals' personalities and their competences to perform tasks of different nature. With this purpose, we extend Wilde's post-Jungian method for team composition, which solely employs individuals' personalities. The aim of this study is to create a model to partition agents into teams that are balanced in competences, personality and gender. Finally, we present some preliminary empirical results that we obtained when analysing student performance. Results show the benefits of a more informed team composition that exploits individuals' competences besides information about their personalities

Public School Choice And Integration: Evidence from Durham, North Carolina

Using evidence from Durham, North Carolina, we examine the impact of school choice programs on racial and class-based segregation across schools. Theoretical considerations suggest that how choice programs affect segregation will depend not only on the family preferences emphasized in the sociology literature but also on the linkages between student composition, school quality and student achievement emphasized in the economics literature. Reasonable assumptions about the distribution of preferences over race, class, and school characteristics suggest that the segregating choices of students from advantaged backgrounds are likely to outweigh any integrating choices by disadvantaged students. The results of our empirical analysis are consistent with these theoretical considerations. Using information on the actual schools students attend and on the schools in their assigned attendance zones, we find that schools in Durham are more segregated by race and class as a result of school choice programs than they would be if all students attended their geographically assigned schools. In addition, we find that the effects of choice on segregation by class are larger than the effects on segregation by race

Making Law More Accessible: Designing Collaborative Learning Environments for Physically Remote Generation Y Students

In addition to an understanding of substantive law, the undergraduate law degree at Queensland University of Technology (QUT) aims to develop students’ lifelong skills. In the unit ‘Principles of Equity’ the skill developed includes teamwork, in the context of legal letter writing. Given the increased technological mobility of Generation Y students, the presenters have developed and trialled a model that enables these skills to be learnt and practiced online. The result is a more flexible environment that not only ensures congruent learning experiences between internal and external (or physically remote) students, but provides a connected or engaged educational program to supplement existing teaching method. This paper outlines the above project, the pedagogy that influenced it, and its impact on student learning experiences. Some issues for the development of such learning innovations in the future are also addresse