Social moderation and calibration versus codification: a way forward for academic standards in higher education?

A key responsibility of higher education providers is the accurate certification of the knowledge and skills attained by their students. However, despite an intense focus on developing relevant quality assurance regulations, academic standards in higher education have remained resistant to explication and consistent application. In this paper, we initially deconstruct and evaluate academic standards and dominant practitioner perspectives on their nature and use, including techno-rational, sociocultural and sociomaterial approaches. The limited prior research on the effectiveness of calibration and social moderation processes is reviewed, highlighting the significant challenges in sharing tacitly held understandings of assessment criteria (attributes of quality) and standards (levels of achievement). Further complications are considered that arise from the varying expertise and power relationships of assessors and the complexities inherent in the development and use of codified artefacts for capturing and sharing standards. We opine that because of the difficulties in clearly representing and agreeing standards, it is unsurprising that there is little evidence of marking consistency to be found in the literature even in contexts where carefully crafted artefacts, such as rubrics, are in use. We conclude that effectiveness would be enhanced through sharing understandings more widely and refocusing the use of assessment codifications towards how they may catalyse effective social moderation and calibration dialogues. Dialogues that foreground individuals’ positions of consensus and dissensus at significant points of interpretation in the assessment process are identified within the paper

Assessment matters: a critical appraisal of assessment practice in higher education with a particular focus on enhancing student understanding of standards and criteria

Eight publications are presented in this thesis with the first published in 2001 and the last in 2018, all are peer reviewed. This body of work is drawn from a wider contribution to pedagogic research and together the papers constitute a coherent programme of study. The papers trace a research journey developed over seventeen years that focuses on how assessment and feedback are both conceptualised and practised within higher education, with a particular emphasis on how students ‘come to know’ what is being sought in assessment in terms of academic standards and the attributes of high quality work. The papers are both conceptual and empirical. The research journey is divided into three main phases. The first phase of papers challenge objectivist assumptions of assessment, and thereby how academic standards and attributes of quality can be best shared with learners (papers 1, 2 and 3). These papers focus on improving learner achievement through enhancing their understanding of academic standards and the attributes of quality sought by assessors. The papers challenge the sometimes taken-­‐for-­‐granted assumption that standards and marking criteria can be fully articulated. Secondly, the papers conceptualise the deeply tacit nature of academic standards and marking criteria, and both theorise and empirically investigate how students gain tacit understandings. The second phase of publications (papers 4, 5, 6) contributes to a reconceptualisation of assessment as socially situated and constructed, and gives more emphasis to social, participatory processes and relationships in the sharing of standards and criteria. They are founded on the premise that for students to produce high quality work they must align with, and participate in, the ways of thinking and practising of the academic community in which assessment standards and practices are constructed. The third and final phase of publications (papers 7 and 8) refocuses on the individual, examining students’ epistemic beliefs and ways of knowing and how these influence student perspectives on and approaches to assessment and feedback, and in so doing highlight the diversity of individual perspectives and some of the limitations of the culturalist assumptions of situated learning approaches. In the final chapter the contribution to knowledge is examined. The body of work contributes to knowledge in four main ways: i) outlining the challenges to prevailing objectivist assumptions of assessment; ii) conceptualising the nature and role of tacit knowledge in developing understandings of assessment criteria and standards; iii) providing a reconceptualisation of the nature of assessment and feedback as socially constructed and situated; iv) outlining the influence of individuals’ epistemic assumptions on their perspectives on, and approaches to, assessment and feedback. Contributions to practice are outlined at both at national and institutional level

What makes good feedback good?

HE institutions persistently seek to increase student engagement and satisfaction with assessment feedback, but with limited success. This study identifies the attributes of good feedback from the perspective of recipients. In a distinctive participatory research design, student participants were invited to bring along actual examples of feedback that they perceived as either ‘good’ or ‘bad’ to 32 interviews with student researchers. Findings highlight the complex interdependency and contextual nature of key influences on students’ perspectives. The feedback artefact itself, its place in assessment and feedback design, relationships of the learner with peers and tutors, and students’ assessment literacy all affect students’ perspectives. We conclude that standardising the technical aspects of feedback, such as the feedback artefact or the timing or medium of its delivery is insufficient: a broader consideration of all key domains of influence is needed to genuinely increase student engagement and satisfaction with feedback

Entrepreneurial egalitarianism: How inequality and insecurity stifle innovation

Despite recent advances in our understanding of how innovation happens – for example, recognising the role of the state in fuelling private sector innovation, and of user demand in enabling the generation and dissemination of innovation – the assumption that inequality somehow enables innovation remains widespread. This paper builds upon empirical evidence that more equal societies tend to be more innovative by exploring how inequality and insecurity can inhibit innovative activity at the individual level, both directly and indirectly, by diminishing the resources and capabilities which enable innovation, and disincentivising risktaking and entrepreneurialism. The paper also outlines an ‘entrepreneurial egalitarianism’ policy agenda, exploring how social and economic policies based on egalitarian values can support innovation, focusing in particular on a contributory social security system with income guarantees that supports entrepreneurial risk-taking, an expansive conception of universal basic services, a widening of access to capital, and the potential for institutions such as trade unions to facilitate innovation

Building back before: fiscal and monetary support for the economy in Britain amid the COVID-19 crisis

This paper explores the local impact of various forms of fiscal and monetary support for UK-based companies in the context of disruption caused by COVID-19 and associated public health restrictions, including support for household incomes (and therefore private consumption) via the ‘furlough’ scheme, the Covid Corporate Financing Facility and various national and local business support schemes. It shows that the economic crisis associated with the pandemic has been construed to justify interventions that preserve the spatially uneven status quo of the UK’s model of economic development, protecting business from harms arising, apparently, from the public’s reaction to the pandemic. To some extent, COVID-19 has been treated as a localised phenomenon that the national economy requires protection from