Introduction

We were delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to this Festschrift, as we have both drawn extensively on Professor Hounsell's rich contributions to the literature on assessment while working over the years to understand students' experiences of being assessed. For the first author of this co-authored chapter, Velda McCune, this began during my PhD studies when I was considering psychology students' experiences of essay writing and found Professor Hounsell's work in this area to be an excellent source of inspiration. Since then, I have had the privilege to work with Professor Hounsell on projects looking at students' experiences of oral presentations and on the Enhancing Teaching–Learning in Undergraduate Courses Project (ETL), to which we will return in more detail later in this chapter.

As part of the ETL Project, we considered how to conceptualise what makes for high quality assessed work in particular subject areas in higher education and how students might come to grasp this. The insights from this work were particularly valuable when I started collaborating with Susan Rhind, my co-author of this chapter, to explore students' experiences of assessment and feedback in veterinary medicine. We were intrigued to explore why these particularly high achieving and committed students should be so worried about having difficulties understanding what was required in their assessments, and Professor Hounsell's work helped us to illuminate and further explore what was happening. For the second author, Susan Rhind, this became a major focus of research interest, since it was clear both from large-scale surveys, such as the National Student Survey in the United Kingdom (UK), and more local evaluations that these concerns were impacting significantly on the student experience. This interest led to the development of a number of practical interventions in the local context. These interventions were always underpinned by a wider desire to understand more fully the student experience relating to assessment and feedback as they progress and develop within their disciplinary community.

This chapter is focused on the interplay between higher education students' prior perspectives on, and experiences of, assessment, the guidance they are given on their assessments and the feedback they receive, as Professor Hounsell's insights into the importance of seeing the interconnections between these different aspects of the assessment process have been central to our work.