Academic Development and Research into Higher Education

Assessment and Feedback

While working in a research active academic development unit, I co-authored a book with my colleague Professor Sue Bloxham. We had produced so much guidance materials for staff I suggested that we just need to bind it and call it a book! As you can imagine, the reality of writing this research-informed practical guide soon caught up with me. The book¹ became a firm fixture on reading lists for postgraduate courses for new lecturers. We pursued further research, especially into grading student work²³. Informed by our research, we proposed a metaphor of ‘interplay’ to capture the power knowledge struggle in teachers’ professional learning⁴⁵. This interest in assessment in higher education informed my practice and led to my ongoing involvement as an associate in the Advance HE ‘Degree Standards Project‘ and my role as conference chair of the Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) network.

Practitioner Research

Leading a postgraduate course for lecturers new to higher education meant that my ‘students’ were actually academic colleagues, and many of them were in the professional fields of teacher and nurse education. I pursued practitioner research into the experiences of these colleagues as they reconstructed their professional identities from practitioners to academics. This ‘becoming a professional educator’ project is still ongoing and gets its own web page. My commitment to professional learning of educators through collaborative inquiry and practitioner research has been a core element of my underpinning discipline of teacher education and development, and I apply it to academics in higher education as well as to schoolteachers. With colleagues we founded the open access journal ‘Practitioner Research in Higher Education’ (PRHE) which publishes practitioner research and critical evaluation of innovative practice papers. I am currently an editor for PRHE.

References:

1. Bloxham, S. & Boyd, P. (2007) Developing Effective Assessment in Higher Education: a practical guide.  London: Mc Graw Hill / Open University Press.
2. Bloxham, S., Boyd, P. & Orr, S. (2011) Mark my words: the role of assessment criteria in UK higher education grading practices. Studies in Higher Education, 36 (6): 655-670.
3. Bloxham, S. & Boyd, P. (2012) Accountability in grading student work: securing academic standards in a twenty-first century quality assurance context. British Educational Research Journal, 38 (4), 615-634.
4. Boyd, P. & Bloxham, S. (2014) A situative metaphor for teacher learning: the case of university tutors learning to grade student coursework. British Educational Research Journal, 40 (2), 337-352.
5. Boyd, P., Hymer, B. & Lockney, K. (2015) Learning Teaching: becoming an inspirational teacher. Critical Publishing.