This book brings together recent developments in thinking about assessment and feedback in university education written by international experts in this field and is devised as a tribute to Professor Dai Hounsell, whose research in this field has been of international importance and influence. Dai has not only contributed to the research on assessment and feedback, but has, over the years, been actively involved in working with colleagues to find ways of improving practice. This book reflects these two aspects. It has been organised into four parts, focusing, first, on the broader view of the nature and purposes of assessment in higher education and, second, on how students perceive their experiences of assessment and feedback, before considering how assessment may have to be reconceptualised, in order to match the demands of university education in the twenty-first century. The final part looks more directly at the implications for practice through discussion of recent innovations in assessment. Most of the authors were able to reflect on some aspect of Dai's academic experience and research, which is wide-ranging and has had significant international impact.

Dai Hounsell's Main Contributions to Research and Academic Development

An important formative period in Dai's involvement in this research area began when he was appointed information and research officer at Lancaster University in 1972. The post initially had an emphasis on informing academic staff about recent developments in the theory and practice of university teaching, but his work led him to develop a research role – in particular, through organising and participating in a series of international conferences that focused on new research in teaching and learning at a time when this field was still relatively undeveloped. These conferences brought together researchers from different countries and one in particular led to the publication of The Experience of Learning, co-edited by Dai. This involvement in, and organisation of, the series of conferences also enabled a sabbatical year with Ference Marton in Gothenburg to imbibe the ideas and atmosphere of an influential research group and later to see first-hand the work of the Tertiary Education Institute at the University of Queensland.

While at Lancaster, he also became involved in a major United Kingdom (UK) Social Science Research Council programme on how students learn, which had international impact.

Introduction

Dai Hounsell's early research on conceptions of essay writing played an important part in helping us to see the different perceptions of assessment shown by students. Since then, he has been at pains to highlight how students' perceptions of the purposes and expected standards of assessed work may differ – sometimes quite markedly – from those of their lecturers, arguing that there is a need, in both research and everyday practice, to gain a firmer sense of how students understand assessments and their demands.

This chapter introduces his study within the context of other research developed around the same time, in order to trace the development of ideas on the influences of perceptions of assessment on the quality of student learning. These early studies were initially based on in-depth student interviews regarding their experiences of studying, bringing in the concepts describing deep and surface approaches to learning and introducing the idea of students having, to differing degrees, a strategic approach when studying and preparing for examinations. The interviews also looked in detail at students' experiences of carrying out assessed work and how they perceived their tutors’ comments. Subsequently, the concepts and categories identified in the qualitative research were used to develop questionnaires that enabled relationships between differing approaches to studying and perceptions of teaching and assessment to be explored among large samples of students.

Approaches to Learning and Perceptions of Teaching and Assessment

Some of the early work on these perceptions was carried out at the University of Lancaster as part of a major Social Science Research Council project into how students learn and study (Entwistle and Ramsden 1983; Hounsell 1984). The project was inspired by the work of Ference Marton and his research team in Gothenburg (Marton and Säljö 1976, 1984), who introduced the distinction between deep and surface approaches to learning. The Swedish research focused mainly on students reading an academic article and analysing their understanding of it, while the Lancaster work explored more generally how students described their everyday studying. Through both interviews and questionnaires the two contrasting approaches to learning were confirmed, but an additional dimension was needed to explain students' experiences.