• A submitted manuscript is the version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers. Link to publication

• A submitted manuscript is the author's version of the article upon submission and before peer-review. There can be important differences between the submitted version and the official published version of record. People interested in the research are advised to contact the author for the final version of the publication, or visit the DOI to the publisher's website. • The final author version and the galley proof are versions of the publication after peer review. • The final published version features the final layout of the paper including the volume, issue and page numbers.

of assessments used to give grades or to satisfy the accountability demands of an external authority, but rather the kind of assessment that can be used as a part of instruction to support and enhance learning. On this topic, I am especially interested in engaging the very large number of educational researchers who participate, in one way or another, in teacher education. The transformation of assessment practices cannot be accomplished in separate tests and measurement courses, but rather should be a central concern in teaching methods courses. The article is organized in three parts. I present, first, an historical framework highlighting the key tenets of social efficiency curricula, behaviorist learning theories, and "scientific measurement." Next, I offer a contrasting socialconstructivist conceptual framework that blends key ideas from cognitive, constructivist, and sociocultural theories. In the third part, I elaborate on the ways that assessment practices should change to be consistent with and support socialconstructivist pedagogy. The impetus for my development of an historical framework was the observation by Beth Graue (1993) that "assessment and instruction are often conceived as curiously separate in both time and purpose" (p. 291, emphasis added). As Graue notes, the measurement approach to classroom assessment, "exemplified by standardized tests and teacher-made emulations of those tests," presents a barrier to the implementation of more constructivist approaches to instruction. To understand the origins of Graue's picture of separation and to help explain its continuing power over presentday practice, I drew the chronology in Figure 1. A longerterm span of history helps us see that those measurement perspectives, now felt to be incompatible with instruction, came from an earlier, highly consistent theoretical framework (on the left) in which conceptions of "scientific measurement" were closely aligned with traditional curricula and beliefs about learning. To the right is an emergent, constructivist paradigm in which teachers' close assessment of students' understandings, feedback from peers, and student self-assessments would be a central part of the social processes that mediate the development of intellectual abilities, construction of knowledge, and formation of students' identities. The best way to understand dissonant current practices, shown in the middle of the figure, is to realize that instruction (at least in its ideal form) is drawn from the emergent paradigm, while testing is held over from the past. Historical Perspectives: Curriculum, Psychology, and Measurement

ion and memory skills, and the separability of social from cognitive skills and knowledge from action . . . performance in cognitive tasks is inseparable from values about appropriate social relationships in such situations" (pp. 58-59). Reliance on others for help in problem-solving situations varies according to the cultural setting. In traditional American and British school settings, relying on a companion for help in assessment is likely to be considered cheating, whereas in other settings in everyday situations not to use a companion's assistance may be regarded as inappropriate. Some researchers in the sociocultural perspective, which focuses on situated learning, suggest that assessment is not necessary, while others suggest that individuals must be assessed as part of a group. For example. Lave and Wenger (1991) argue that, in the apprenticeship system, testing is not necessary since increasing participation has its own use value; in settings such as schools, however, learning becomes commoditized, and exchange value, demonstrated through testing, replaces use value: Gipps: Socio-Cultural Aspects of Assessment 377 The commoditization of learning engenders a fundamental contradiction between the use and exchange values of the outcome of learning, which manifests itself in conflicts between learning to know and learning to display knowledge for evaluation. Testing in schools and trade schools (unnecessary in situations of apprenticeship learning) is perhaps the most pervasive and salient example of a way of establishing the exchange value of knowledge. Test taking then becomes a new parasitic practice, the goal of which is to increase the exchange value of learning independently of its use value, (p. 112) The requirement, in the sociocultural perspective, to assess the processes of learning and to assess learning in the social setting can be met in a number of ways. Portfolios can be used to reflect the processes of learning and their development over time. Portfolios, of course, take many forms: They may contain items selected at intervals by the teacher or "best" pieces of work chosen by the pupil; work in the portfolio may be assessed in a more or less standardized way (Koretz et al., 1993). To support the sociocultural model of learning, they need in some way to reflect or articulate the social setting in which the learning took place. Commentary by the teacher and the pupil can describe the social situation of learning. For example, student and teacher commentaries are part of the final portfolio in the PROPEL project (Wolf et al., 1991). These commentaries are focused on the process of learning and developing achievement, and they encourage reflection on the part of both pupil and teacher. The process, Wolf (1989) argues, is difficult because portfolios ' 'demand intimate and often frighteningly subjective talk with students" (p. 37). Pupils may be unwilling to engage in the intellectual process, while teachers may be unable to give up control of the discussion. But when it works, she argues, it is well worth the effort. Assessment within a social situation can be afforded by assessing students in collaborative group activities in which they contribute to a task and help others. "In such assessment, as in instruction using group approaches, the student can observe how others reason and can receive feedback on his or her own efforts. In this context, not only performance, but also the facility with which a student adapts to help and guidance, can be assessed" (Glaser & Silver, 1994, pp. 412-413). Such socially situated collaborative assessment also has the advantage of encouraging students to develop and question their definitions of competence. Brown and colleagues analyze collaborative assessment environments and compare them with collaborative teaching environments. In their view (Brown et al., 1992), the crucial difference between the two is that in the teaching environment aid is opportunistic, while in the assessment environment aid is in the form of "standardized hints." Lampert (1990) describes a project in the teaching of mathematics in which the roles and responsibilities of teachers and students within classroom discourse were altered. Sometimes the teacher consciously held back from commenting on answers given by students, and so the class developed discussion around the problems and tasks, made hypotheses about solutions, and took risks in the way that the mathematical community would. The teacher, standing back, refused to be the intellectual authority in the way that is normally the case in school mathematics. This approach to learning in a classroom community entails a 378 Review of Research in Education, 24 different view of assessment of pupil attainment, one based very much on understanding: The questions I expected them to answer went beyond simply determining whether they could get the solutions. I also expected them to answer questions about mathematical assumptions and the legitimacy of their strategies. Answers to problems were given by students, but I did not interpret them to be the primary indication of whether they knew mathematics, (p. 38) The emphasis was on the analysis of the students' language, their assertions, and their ability to demonstrate that their strategies were valid. In such a group/community learning situation, assessment may be focused as much on the group as on individuals: "By the end of the lesson, 14 of the 18 students present in the class had had something mathematically substantial to say about exponents" (p. 52). Cobb and Bowers (1998), too, talk about assessment (using the term evaluation) within the group. Within their cognitive and situated perspective on learning, performance is socially situated. Therefore, the teacher should evaluate the group's changing beliefs and reasoning, and the individual should be evaluated in relation to the group. The issue for Cobb and Bowers is how one views individuals whose (mathematical) reasoning is less effective than others in the group. They describe such students as those who have less sophisticated ways of participating in particular classroom practices. Since performance is socially situated, the performance resides not just in the student but in the relationship between the teacher and the individual. They treat academic success/failure as the exclusive property neither of individual students nor of the instruction they receive. They see it as a "relation" between individual students and the practices that they and the teacher construct. So, pupil assessment in this model focuses on the individual as part of the group, and the key issue becomes how or whether one interprets the evidence of performance of individuals. Assessment within the framework of sociocultural theory is seen as interactive, dynamic, and collaborative. Rather than an external and formalized activity, assessment is integral to the teaching process and embedded in the social and cultural life of the classroom. Such an approach is seen as constructive—because of its focus on assessing the process of learning, the attempt to elicit elaborated performance, and the emphasis on collaborative activity (whether the collaboration is with the teacher or a group of peers). Much of the work in this field is still at the level of research, however, and a number of issues remain to be clarified. For example, such assessment is often time consuming and demands particular skills of the teacher/assessor. The procedures, being unstandardized, do not meet traditional reliability criteria, and this has an impact on the purposes for which the assessment can or should be used. There are many issues to be resolved around the evaluation of individuals within group performance. A key issue, too, is the relationship between teacher/assessor and pupil. The Assessment Relationship In traditional assessment, the relationship between teacher and student is a hierarchical one. The teacher sets and defines the task and determines its evaluation. The student's role is to be the object of this activity and, through the Gipps: Socio-Cultυral Aspects of Assessment 379 completion of a range of tests, to be graded. However, if one uses an interpretive approach, there are other ways of seeing this relationship. In newer forms of assessment, such as negotiated assessment and self-assessment, the student has a role in discussing and negotiating the terms and outcomes of the assessment, although in reality such a practice may be rare. The thesis behind such a nontraditional approach (critical-theoretic in Habermas's framework) is that students need to become involved in the assessment process so that they are encouraged to monitor and reflect on their own performance in order to become self-monitoring and self-regulating learners (Broadfoot, 1996; Wittrock & Baker, 1991; Wolf et al., 1991). A key element of the interpretive paradigm is the need to understand a learner's response. In relation to informal assessment, this includes the learner's expectations, assumptions, and interpretations of the classroom culture, task demands, and criteria for success (Aikenhead, 1997). Sadler (1998), developing this line of argument further, points out that teachers commonly bring with them to the assessment setting a more elaborate and extensive knowledge base, a set of attitudes or dispositions toward teaching as an activity, skill in devising assessments, a deep knowledge of criteria and standards appropriate to the assess­ ment task, evaluative skills in making judgements about student performance, and expertise in framing feedback statements. Sadler argues that an appreciation of these resources and skills is important because eventually the teacher must share them with the student in order to pass them on. Ultimately the intention of most educational systems is to help students not only grow in knowledge and expertise, but also to become progressively independent of the teacher fo

ing complexities can allow the learner to reach learning goals, especially novice learners. This is observed in the remote biology lab in Hossain et al. (2015) and the virtual chemistry lab discussed in Woodfield et al. (2005). Hossain et al. (2015) discussed how a non-biology student with no wet lab training is able to conduct biology experiments using a remote lab. This allows the student to focus on the P. polycephalum experiment by abstracting away from the wet lab training which is not the objective of the lab experiment. This sentiment is re-iterated by Woodfield et al. (2005:1674): “...the largest educational benefit of the inorganic simulation is that students can focus on the principles of general chemistry, rather than focusing on troubleshooting aspects in a laboratory setting. These troubleshooting aspects imply more than just laboratory technique. Laboratory technique focuses on how to do something, whereas the troubleshooting aspects focus more on why something does not happen the way it should. One of the reasons beginning chemistry students feel overwhelmed in their first laboratory class is because, we believe, they are consumed by the details of lab technique and the troubleshooting aspects in the laboratory.” Other studies have also used PLTs in their design. In Hwang et al. (2014), students who collaborated in NVBLab achieved higher learning outcomes in comparison to the control group. The authors designed tools and laboratory activities for collaborative work based on Online Collaborative Learning (OCL) theory (Harasim, 2011), resulting in improved learning outcomes. Ding and Fang (2009) combined constructivist teaching approaches and a simulated lab environment where students are able to explore diffraction and reflection of light by configuring parameters in experiments in order to learn physics concepts. The Virtual ChemLab (Woodfield et al., 2005) also allowed students to explore in an unrestricted simulation environment where they can create experiments, test and view their results. Chapter 2 – Literature Review 39 Exploratory learning (Njoo and de Jong, 1993) was enabled through simulated lab environments. In de Jong et al. (2014), students are guided and supported to learn by following an inquiry-based learning approach. Students are not directly offered information but rather taken through a guided investigation process whereby a research question/hypothesis is derived, investigations are conducted via experimentation using remote and simulated labs, results are observed and conclusions are made. In the VALUE project (Achuthan et al., 2011), rather than providing a simulation or virtual experiment environment by itself, each experiment is guided by Theory, Procedure, SelfEvaluation, Simulator, Assignment and References for further information. This approach combines each experiment with background context and learning materials taking a holistic approach to the design of virtual labs and lab activities. Prieto-Blazquez et al. (2009) argue that rather than simply providing a virtual lab, a number of critical components, including technological resources, pedagogic and strategic resources, and academic staff resources should be developed to enhance student knowledge and skills in programming. They conclude with students rating pedagogical and human factors highly in addition to the technological resources in VPLab (PrietoBlazquez et al., 2009). It is clear from the above analysis that in order to achieve learning goals the above studies did not present the technology-enhanced labs by themselves but provided supporting tools and resources for learning and followed sound PLTs (e.g., inquiry-based learning) in their design. This analysis provides us with evidence to answer our research question “How do we design lab environments to take advantage of technology for effective learning?”. It reveals that the design of such lab environments for effective learning needs to integrate technology artefacts (such as virtual and remote labs), leveraging their benefits while also providing the necessary support, tools and resources for effective learning guided by sound PLTs. Thus, this thesis postulates the following hypothesis to answer the above research question: Hypothesis: Design of technology-enhanced lab environments taking a holistic view of learning incorporating learning context, curriculum design, lab activities, assessments, resources and technology artefacts based on sound pedagogical and learning principles and theories have a higher potential for effective learning. Chapter 2 – Literature Review 40 The design of a technology-enhanced lab environment that includes curriculum design, lab activities, support tools, resources and technology artefacts based on sound PLTs is referred to as a Technology-enhanced Pedagogical Framework (TePF) for lab environments in this thesis. A TePF for a lab environment needs to be implemented in a particular learning context. Thus, this thesis implements and evaluates a TePF for a lab environment in a system level course in computing education to validate the above hypothesis. The next section discusses related work in technology-enhanced labs in system level courses in computing. 2.3 Technology-enhanced Labs in System Level Courses in Computing Similar to other disciplines, lab work is critical for student learning in computing and information technology fields. In particular, system level courses in computing education, such as information security, networking, system administration and operating systems, use hands-on activities that require students to configure hardware and system level software (operating systems, firewalls, security settings, etc.) with administrative privileges in complex networked environments. Such laboratory activities require specialised physical labs with equipment isolated from other campus networks. This can be prohibitive, both financially and practically, and this approach inherits other constraints of physical labs such as restricted access. Virtualization and related cloud computing technologies have provided the means to implement virtual computing labs that enable students to create, configure and deploy virtual IT infrastructure (e.g., VMs, switches, routers, etc.) and conduct experiments without the need to have specialised physical labs for system level courses in computing. In the literature, a number of virtual lab implementations using virtualization s have been researched. The following sections presented a discussion of virtualization technologies and virtual computing labs in general followed by a review of related work. 2.3.1 Virtualization Technologies and Virtual Computing Labs Virtualization technologies have provided capabilities to virtualise hardware, software and network infrastructure. These technologies are fuelling cloud computing infrastructure and newer IT service delivery models. Organisations can now provision virtual IT infrastructure on demand Chapter 2 – Literature Review 41 hosted in centralised data centres accessible remotely via networks. The physical infrastructure can be managed within an organisation (private cloud environments) or hosted external to the organisation by third party cloud providers (public cloud). Virtualization is a group of technologies that allows configuration of virtual infrastructure over physical resources. Thus, with virtualization technologies, we can configure multiple virtual machines (VMs) with configured hardware (such as disk space, RAM, CPU, etc.) to run on a single piece of physical hardware (which is called the host). Similarly, we can configure complex network resources (e.g. virtual switches, virtual routers, storage, etc.), in this virtual environment. These capabilities have been exploited and revolutionised the delivery and deployment of IT services today – generally known as cloud computing. IT organisations (such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft and others) have used these technologies in their data centres to virtualise and deliver IT resources as IT services to organisations and communities. These service providers are commonly known as public cloud service providers. Nowadays, a person or an organisation can rent computing resources (e.g. servers, storage, computing power, etc.) through the Internet from these cloud providers. Additionally, internal IT departments of organisations have taken advantage of these technologiesand provide IT resources to their organisations which are generally known as private cloud environments. Cloud service providers offer different levels of IT services. These services are broadly classified as: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS); Platform as a Service (PaaS); and Software as a Service (SaaS). In IaaS, IT infrastructure resources such as storage and CPU are provided. Examples of such providers are Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. In PaaS, developers are provided with an environment to develop and deploy web applications in cloud environments. An example of this is Google’s App Engine. In SaaS, rather than installing software on local machines, users rent IT applications from cloud providers. Examples include Google Docs (from Google), Office 365 (from Microsoft) and other offerings. At the heart of virtualization is the hypervisor technology. This is a software layer that enables the deployment of different re-configurable virtual resources (storage, memory, CPUs, etc.) on physical hardware. There are two main types of hypervisors – Type 1 are bare-metal hypervisors and Type 2 are embedded hypervisors. In the Type 1 (bare metal) hypervisor, the hypervisor runs on the hardware and provides a virtualization platform. In Type 2, the host’s operating system runs on the hardware while the hypervisors run as an application on the host Operating System allowing Chapter 2 – Literature Review 42 a virtualization platform. Figure 2.1 provides an overview of Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors. Examples of Type 1

ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS iv TABLE OF CONTENTS v LIST OF TABLES x LIST OF FIGURES xiii CHAPTER

he assessment practice in Indonesian Higher Education presently uses the traditional methods, which are assessment for learning and assessment as learning. However, the new perspective on assessment proposes that it should include the process of learning called Assessment for Learning (AFL) and this assessment can be enhanced through the Constructive Alignment (CA) method. The main objective of this study was to determine the correlation between AFL and CA based on age. The respondents of this study were 454 lecturers of 11 Universities selected through multistage cluster sampling method. This study used explanatory sequential design, a combination of quantitative and qualitative method. Quantitative data were obtained using questionnaires followed by qualitative data collection using interviews. The qualitative data were used to explain the quantitative data results. Quantitative data were analyzed using ANOVA, chi-square, and SEM. The validity and reliability of the instruments were determined using the Rasch Model. The findings showed that there was a high correlation level of AFL and CA practice among the lecturers. Keywords: Assessment for Learning, Constructive Alignment, Indonesian Higher Education

architecture Abstract: Today's e-learning environments are highly flexible in terms of the learning activities they support, the learning resources they use and manage, and the technical means they offer to adapt to the learning situation and the preferences of the learner. Providing feedback through assessment is known as an approach to supporting self- regulated learning in such environments. This paper motivates that assessment in general (and formative assessment in particular) are of high value because they can support self-regulated learning by integrating a feedback cycle. This paper proposes a technology-based assessment platform consisting of an open and versatile architecture called TAO. This open-source system offers the necessary flexibility to cope with the requirements imposed by modern e-learning environments.

Within many higher education systems there is a search for means to increase levels of student satisfaction with assessment feedback. This article suggests that the search is under way in the wrong place by concentrating on feedback as a product rather than looking more widely to feedback as a long-term dialogic process in which all parties are engaged. A three-year study, focusing on engaging students with assessment feedback, is presented and analysed using an analytical model of stages of engagement. The analysis suggests that a more holistic, socially-embedded conceptualisation of feedback and engagement is needed. This conceptualisation is likely to encourage tutors to support students in more productive ways, which enable students to use feedback to develop their learning, rather than respond mechanistically to the tutors’ ‘instruction’.

With the increasing popularity of peer assessment as an assessment tool, questions may arise about its measurement quality. Among such questions, the extent peer assessment practices adhere to standards of measurement. It has been claimed that new forms of assessment, require new criteria to judge their validity and reliability, since they aim for specific goals and address different aspects of learning. But although new criteria have been formulated, little is known about how they are deployed and operate in actual peer assessment practices. This study intends to explicate the quality criteria relevant to the context of peer assessment. We conducted a survey in vocational education on peer assessment quality criteria applied in classrooms. Fifty-six teachers using peer assessment rated several quality criteria as relevant to their teaching practice. The findings suggest that peer assessment practices entail many of the quality criteria recognized in measurement and evaluation, although in an embedded way: the generic quality criteria are tuned or adapted to the peer assessment setting. The findings also show that peer assessment is very much in the hands of the teacher, who organizes and orchestrates the appraisal process in which students receive clear guidelines to appraise one another's work. Our results indicate that quality criteria hardly differ from the function peer assessment serves in classrooms, either within a summative or formative evaluation context. By gaining insight on the specific criteria of peer assessment and their precise purposes, we believe it becomes possible to help teachers improve its measurement quality.

While the importance of feedback to learning is well acknowledged in the pedagogical literature, the perceptions of multiple forms of feedback among learners is yet to attract significant attention, particularly in the IS context. Consequently, this research investigates the antecedent constituents of feedback and how they contribute to an overall perception of feedback in an introductory IS course. Building upon such investigation, the study explores how such an overall perception of feedback contributes to a favourable experience in a course. To such end, a research model grounded in the pedagogical literature was operationalised and quantitative empirical data collected and analysed using PLS. The results indicate that summative and generic assessment feedback were found to be significant towards formulating an overall perception of feedback, and that such perception is significant in influencing a learner’s experience in a course. The findings hold important implications to theory and practice, particularly for IS education.

While the impact of formative assessment practices on learning outcomes is receiving increasing attention, the dominant function of the statutory assessment system in England and Wales is summative. As authors of the statutory end of Key Stage 2 tests between 1995 and 1999, we are aware of a volume of test performance data generated in the course of the summative regime. Summative performance data are available on the cohort of 600,000 pupils, at age 11, assessed annually. We have further illuminated these data by an annual qualitative re-marking of a sub-sample stratified by three overall achievement levels. We suggest that many test items are analogous to concept probes within the constructivist paradigm. When pupils’ assessed understanding can be mapped onto lines of progression, assessment can have a powerful formative capability in informing classroom teaching and learning practices. The characteristics of test items which may combine summative and formative utility are discussed.

While carrying out formative assessment activities over social network services (SNS), it has been noted that personalized notifications have a high chance of “the important post getting lost” in the notification feed. In order to highlight this problem, this paper compares within a posttest only quasi-experiment, a total of 104 first year undergraduate students, all of which are prospective ICT teachers, in two groups. A formative assessment system in the ubiquitous learning context is delivered over an SNS in both groups. In the first group, the SNS has been used for the entire assessment task.  In the second group, the questions have been delivered and responses were received over mobile phone “SMS” messages, while the SNS was used solely for providing feedback. The cases were compared in terms of voluntary participation rates and academic success. Both response rates and academic success have been significantly higher in the SMS group. When asked their reasons for not responding to questions; the SNS-only group frequently reported “not noticing the questions being sent”. This may indicate a flaw in message design for using social networks as LMS's. Sensible use of push-messages is advised.

What does informal formative assessment look like in the context of scientific inquiry teaching? Is it possible to identify different levels of informal assessment practices? Can different levels of informal assessment practices be related to levels of student learning? This study addresses these issues by exploring how 4 middle school science teachers used questions as a method of informal formative assessment, and compares those practices to measures of student learning. The approach to exploring each teacher's questioning practices is based on viewing whole-class discussions as assessment conversations in which the teacher has the opportunity to draw out and act on students' evolving understanding. Assessment conversations are described as consisting of four-step cycles, where the teacher elicits a question, the student responds, the teacher recognizes the student's response, and then uses the information collected to student learning. Our results indicate that the teachers whose enactment of informal formative assessment was more consistent with this model had students with higher performance on embedded assessments. This trend was also reflected in the posttest scores. In addition, we found that teachers focused more on epistemic, rather than conceptual, features of scientific inquiry in their discussions. The study underlines the importance of informal formative assessment during scientific inquiry discussions for teacher training and professional development as a way to increase student learning.

We propose the use of students’ science notebooks as one possible unobtrusive method for examining some aspects of teaching quality. We used students’ science notebooks to examine the nature of instructional activities they encountered in their science classes, the nature of their teachers’ feedback, and how these two aspects of teaching were correlated with students’ achievement. We examined the characteristics of students’ science notebooks from 10 fifth-grade classrooms. Six students’ notebooks in each classroom were randomly selected. Each entry of each student’s science notebook was analyzed according to the characteristics of the activity, quality of student’s performance as reflected by the notebook entry, and the teacher feedback in the notebook. Results indicated that (a) raters can consistently classify notebook entries despite the diversity of the forms of communication (written, schematic or pictorial). They can also consistently score the quality of a student’s communication, conceptual and procedural understanding, and the quality of a teacher’s feedback to the student. (b) The intellectual demands of the tasks required by the teachers were, in general, low. Teachers tended to ask students to record the results of an experiment or to copy definitions. (c) Low student performance scores across two curriculum units revealed that students’ communication skills and understanding were far from the maximum score and did not improve over the course of instruction during the school year. And (d) teachers provided little, if any, feedback. Only 4 of the 10 teachers provided any feedback to students’ notebook entries, and when feedback was provided, comments took the form of a grade, checkmark, or a code phrase. We concluded that the benefits of science notebooks as a learning tool for students and as a source of information for teachers were not exploited in the science

We examine the impact of a peer feedback template with varying structuring degree.All students provide a balanced proportion of verifications and elaborations.In general, students provide slightly more positive and suggestive peer feedback.More structure directs the focus of peer feedback more on particular criteria.A higher structuring degree can be beneficial for peer feedback content quality. The present study examines the added value of structuring the peer assessment process, by providing students with a peer feedback template with a varying structuring degree, for the peer feedback content quality in a wiki environment in higher education. The present study took place in the 1st year of a university course in Instructional Sciences (N=176) and more specifically compared three conditions: no structure peer feedback (control), basic structure peer feedback, and elaborate structure peer feedback condition. Quantitative content analysis of students' (n=41) peer feedback messages was performed, and an analysis of (co)variance revealed some discrepancies between the conditions regarding the proportion of peer feedback content categories: (1) peer feedback style, (2) verification type, (3) verification focus, (4) elaboration type, and (5) elaboration focus. This study demonstrated that a higher structuring degree in a peer feedback template during the peer assessment process might have an impact on peer feedback content with respect to the above-mentioned categories; the peer feedback content. Results revealed significant differences between the three conditions regarding the peer feedback content categories. This study illustrated how a practical instructional intervention in the feedback process can increase the potential impact of peer assessment and boost students' learning in higher education.

We compared the usage of interactive arithmetic in classroom and computer lab.We used 3 groups: (1) classroom, (2) computer lab and (3) mixed usage of both.Groups interacting with the system in the classroom achieved higher learning.Peer interaction looks to be the key factor for learning improvement. One of the main benefits of using technology in education is the opportunity it provides for student interactivity. The best place to implement interactive learning technology in schools has been a topic of debate, with the classroom and computer lab the most common choices. This paper joins the debate by studying whether there is any difference in learning when comparing individual interactive work in the classroom using a Shared Display Interpersonal Computer with individual work in a computer lab using personal computers. Comparisons were made between (1) classroom work using a Shared Display Interpersonal Computer with an individual mouse for each student, (2) work in a computer lab using a personal computer, and (3) a mixed model using a combination of the two. Both systems used the same unit-based arithmetic software, with the same functionality and interface. In the Shared Display Interpersonal Computer group, the children shared a single screen, while in the computer lab group each child had their own PC and monitor. The results of the study favor classroom groups working with a Shared Display Interpersonal Computer. Possible explanations for this include greater interaction between peers and increased teacher support for students in the classroom. However, this is beyond the scope of this paper and must therefore be validated by future work.

University teaching and learning in the 21st century and beyond requires novel approaches to meet the imperatives of global challenges. With increasing numbers of university goers and a multitude of Information and Communication technologies, higher education institutions are embracing various technological innovations to enhance teaching and learning. This paper presents the state-of-the-art of university teaching, and provides new concepts for teaching and learning at university level. A novel technology enabled constructivist learning is proposed as a framework for future university teaching. Keywords—Mobile learning, active learning, collaborative learning. B 72 Enhancing Mathematics Learning through Peer Assessment

Ubiquitous computing and mobile technologies provide a new perspective for designing innovative outdoor learning experiences. The purpose of this study is to propose a formative assessment design for integrating PDAs into ecology observations. Three learning activities were conducted in this study. An action research approach was applied to continually revise the worksheet designs. Twenty-seven 5 th and 6 th graders’ observation skills using PDAs, and their extended inquiry performance using e-diaries were assessed. An e-library, and online scoring and feedback systems were developed accordingly. The results suggest that the embedded formative assessment designs were effective for guiding and supporting the students’ learning progress. The activity worksheets successfully helped the students focus their outdoor learning attention on the target tasks. The e-library provided reliable resources to clarify their observed descriptions, while the automatic scoring and feedback systems were especially helpful in sustaining the students’ persistent effort. Most students demonstrated substantial improvements in their observation skills, and extended their inquiry abilities. The well designed online formative assessment embedded in the activity worksheet is very promising for PDA integrated learning.

Traditionally, science instruction has focused on creating an interactive, intrinsically motivational approach to teaching, i.e., ‘delivery’, but there is a need to be paying just as much attention to empower students with the ability to ‘receive’ the science. Some of the keys to this recipe include the use of self-assessment tests; activities that require the interpretation of case studies; peer instruction interactions; online and multimedia lessons which encourage top down/bottom up science processing strategies to decipher meaning; and simulations that test all of the science skills in action. Online materials foster autonomous learners in a science practice. The end goal progresses students to function outside a passive classroom environment so they may, without the aid of an external evaluator, shift the process of learning from the teacher to the student. This paper addresses critical issues in Anatomy and Physiology education; how to better motivate students and help them make the connection to what is important to learn; how to get students to see the whole topic rather than minute details; how to help students who lack study skills and how to instill critical thinking skills from entry to the course so as to succeed in learning attribution to efficacy. Within this philosophical framework, formative assessment techniques provide students with the knowledge and detail that is needed to move forward in their careers, through an emphasis on critical thinking, conceptual understanding, and relevant application of knowledge. In doing so the resources provided help students to: • come to class better prepared for lectures • get immediate feedback and context-sensitive help on assignments and quizzes; and • track their progress throughout the course