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Students' preferences in undergraduate mathematics assessment

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journal contribution
posted on 2016-06-07, 10:48 authored by Paola Iannone, Adrian Simpson
Existing research into students’ preferences for assessment methods has been developed from a restricted sample: in particular, the voice of students in the ‘hard-pure sciences’ has rarely been heard. We conducted a mixed method study to explore mathematics students’ preferences of assessment methods. In contrast to the message from the general assessment literature, we found that mathematics students differentially prefer traditional assessment methods such as closed book examination; they perceive them to be fairer than innovative methods and they perceive traditional methods to be the best discriminators of mathematical ability. We also found that although students prefer to be assessed by traditional methods they are also concerned by the mix of methods they encounter during their degree, suggesting that more account needs to be taken about the students’ views of this mix. We discuss the impact of the results on the way general findings about assessment preference should be interpreted.

Funding

This paper was funded by the Maths, Stats & OR Network of the Higher Education Academy in the UK .

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Mathematics Education Centre

Published in

Studies in Higher Education

Volume

40

Issue

6

Pages

1046 - 1067

Citation

IANNONE, P. and SIMPSON, A., 2015. Students' preferences in undergraduate mathematics assessment. Studies in Higher Education, 40(6), pp. 1046-1067.

Publisher

© 2014 Society for Research into Higher Education. Published by Taylor and Francis

Version

  • AM (Accepted Manuscript)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/

Publication date

2014-03-28

Notes

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Studies in Higher Education on 28th March 2014, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03075079.2013.858683

ISSN

0307-5079

eISSN

1470-174X

Language

  • en

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