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Rust, C, Price, M and O'Donovan, B Improving students' learning by developing their understanding of assessment criteria and processes. Rust, C, Price, M and O'Donovan, B (2003) Improving students' learning by developing their understanding of assessment criteria and processes. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education , 28 (2). pp. 147-164.

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In recent years there has been an increasing emphasis in higher education on the explicit articulation of assessment standards and requirements-whether this emanates from calls for public accountability or based on ideas of good educational practice (Ecclestone, 2001). We argue in this paper that a single-minded focus on explicit articulation, whilst currently the dominant logic of higher education, will inevitably fall short of providing students and staff with meaningful knowledge of standards and criteria. Inherent difficulties in the explicit verbal description of standards and criteria make a compelling argument for the consideration of the role of structured processes that support the effective transfer of both explicit and tacit assessment knowledge. With reference to both empirical evidence and the literature we propose a conceptual framework for the transfer of knowledge of assessment criteria and standards that encompasses a spectrum of tacit and explicit processes, which has proven to be effective in practice in improving student performance.

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It is clear from the literature that feedback is potentially the most powerful and potent part of the assessment cycle when it comes to improving further student learning. However, for some time, there has been a growing amount of research evidence that much feedback practice does not fulfil this potential to influence future student learning because it fails in a host of different ways. This dilemma of the disjuncture between theory and practice has been increasingly highlighted by the UK National Student Survey results. This paper uses a model of the assessment process cycle to frame understandings drawn from the literature, and argues that the problem with much current practice resides largely in a failure to effectively engage students with feedback. The paper goes on to explore how best to effectively engage students with assessment feedback, with evidenced examples of feedback strategies that have successfully overcome this problem.

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