Guide to using Evidence in Higher Education

This Guide to Using Evidence has been designed to, to support and encourage students and students’ association and union staff to actively engage with data and evidence. It offers an accessible introduction to a range of key ideas and concepts and a range of activities which allow readers to develop their own thinking and confidence in key areas. The ambition of its authors, QAA Scotland and the students who reviewed early drafts, is that students and students’ association and union staff will reach for this resource as they prepare for committees, devise new campaigns, deliver services, and do all of the other things they do to enhance students’ experiences and outcomes. Underpinning all of this is a belief that students themselves, the institutions they are working with, and the sector as a whole, are better served when students are, and are seen to be, agents in the ‘data landscape’, not just subjects of it. Engaging with this Guide will help students and students’ association and union staff to develop that sense of agency in themselves and foster it in others. This Guide is a product of a student-led project coordinated by QAA Scotland as part of the Evidence for Enhancement Theme (2017-20)

Police and Crime Commissioners : emerging 'drug policy actors'?

In 2013, the Police and Crime Commissioner for Durham, Ron Hogg, initiated a debate around the future of British drug policy. In June 2015, the Derbyshire PCC, Alan Charles, opened a similar debate with representatives from policing, third party support agencies, national advocates and academics to discuss the possibilities for change. This short article presents the views and actions of senior figures in the police service and discusses motivations for pursuing change. The aim of the paper is to introduce Police and Crime Commissioners as 'drug policy actors' (Seddon 2011) and to highlight key areas for further academic enquiry

Balancing academic gatekeeping and interpersonal positioning: a qualitative analysis of written feedback to undergraduate students

This article will discuss the findings from a qualitative analysis of 136 pieces of written feedback on summative student assessments. The assessment and feedback mechanisms vary in format, and the sample covered all three levels of an undergraduate programme (four courses) in one case department. This article will evidence linguistic variations in written feedback which signify an unequal discursive relationship between the marker and student. This variation is likely to contribute to issues in feedback clarity and consistency. Tensions amid the language used reflect academic gatekeeping, and the interpersonal aspect of feedback, will be discussed with reference to notions of 'linguistic capital'. Assisting students in the interpretation of written feedback, and encouraging alternative forms of feedback to enhance staff-student dialogue will be suggested as recommendations

Designing in student engagement via course design

The criminology subject group recently revalidated its courses. The priorities for the course design were : discipinary pedagogy, course identity, student satisfaction, academic skills, employability, research informed teaching

Postmodernism and criminological thought : ‘Whose science? Whose knowledge?’

The way we think about crime and the way that society responds to it are imbued with values that can determine what is considered important and what gets attention. Sometimes values that are claimed may not be the values expressed in practice, as we see in the multiple and confusing discourses about victims and offenders, punishment and protection, rights and responsibilities. The collection of writings in this book considers values in crime theory, criminal justice and research practice, uncovering the many different 'sides' – to echo Howard Becker's famous phrase – that criminologists, policy makers and researchers take. This specific chapter focuses on postmodernism and the challenge of taking sides

What students’ want in written feedback: praise, clarity and precise individual commentary

This research paper explores a sample of written summative feedback which was provided to undergraduate social science based students in 2014-2015. A series of focus groups were facilitated where students evaluated 95 pieces of individual written feedback and discussed their findings. Texts were scored, ranked and used to create mini corpora of high and low ranking feedback. A contrastive analysis examined frequency counts, keyword analyses as well as concordances, collocations and semantic analyses. This analysis was supported by student annotations of their evaluations and thematic coding of the verbal discussions which took place. This research has been able to outline the characteristics of feedback which students in this sample judged to be effective - specific praise, clarity and completeness, forward orientation, interpersonal positioning and clear and error free text. The contrastive analysis brought the metadiscoursal features strongly into focus, with distinct linguistic patterns emerging in the use of modals, personal pronouns and the mitigation of criticism. Findings confirmed the highly interpersonal nature of academic feedback and students demonstrated particular sensitivity to the tenor of the feedback and the way criticism was incorporated. There were also distinct preferences concerning the length and presentation of text, the quality of praise, and whether it contained a forward orientation

Supporting the evaluation of academic practices: Reflections for institutional change and professional development

In this paper, ten principles for evaluating blended teaching and learning in an age of Covid-19 (Austen,2020)are discussed with specific suggestions for academic practice/practitioners; evaluation strategy, student involvement, rationale for change, comparisons, data types, standards of evidence, indicators of success, evaluation research, review, resource, and capacity. The initial reflections (July 2020) focused on supporting the higher education sector with institution-wide evaluations, as this was the strategic and regulatory pressure at that time. However, institutional evaluations are only possible if they are informed by a local evidence base. In this opinion piece, the ten evaluative principles are reframed to encourage evaluative thinking by academic practitioners, and particularly those defined as early adopters. This piece encourages institutions and practitioners to reframe an emphasis on evaluation methods into a critical space of evaluative thinking while appreciating the contingent factors of their institution and its stakeholder

Integrative Reviewing for exploring complex phenomena

Integrative Reviews go beyond traditional boundaries of systematic reviewing by welcoming experts as valid sources of evidence and as providers of continuous data collection and synthesis • Development of a robust Integrative Review (IR) protocol is crucial for preserving confidence in the process and quality assurance • IRs are characterised by an underpinning positivist ontology, acknowledging that certain sources of evidence can be treated as real; yet IR furthers that position by acknowledging that such reality is socially constructed, thus allowing a more fluid epistemology to emerge, more aligned to a post-positivist perspective. This aligns IR processes with a Critical Realism traditio