Involving students in the scholarship of assessment

This chapter focuses on an initiative designed to promote students’ awareness, reflection and conceptual development of assessment for learning (AfL) in higher education (McDowell et al. 2006). It involved the creation of an optional module that explicitly invited undergraduates to engage with, and contribute their voices to, recent research and development work on assessment and feedback. Having studied and discussed the growing literature on AfL in higher education, students subsequently authored guides to AfL. These were, on the whole, collaboratively created and were targeted at lecturers or first-year students. Many of the guides that students produced explicitly encouraged their readers to rethink and improve their own feedback and learning practices.