Signature assessment and feedback practices in the disciplines

In the main, attention to disciplinary practices has been neglected in assessment and feedback research (Coffey et al., 2011; Cowie & Moreland, 2015). Only recently, the longstanding interest in authentic assessment (e.g. Wiggins, 1989) has re-surfaced in higher education literature on authentic assessment design (Ashford-Rowe et al., 2014; Villarroel et al., 2018) and authentic feedback (Dawson et al., 2020).

To address this gap, in our 2019 call for papers for this special issue, we sought articles that would explore the potential of what we called ‘signature’ assessment and feedback practices. Just as signature pedagogies (Shulman, 2005) have directed attention to discipline- and profession-specific teaching practices in higher education, we used the term ‘signature’ to invite researchers and educators to consider discipline-specific assessment and feedback practices. While these signatures will be authentic to a discipline, the term implies that they will be uniquely characteristic of a particular discipline. Thus, we invited researchers and educators to dig deeply into what makes a discipline or profession special and distinct from other fields. Because attention to disciplines has the potential to connect primary and secondary with tertiary education, which is often siloed in its own journals, the call for papers also explicitly sought examples from different levels of education.

Two years later, this special issue contains five theoretically framed and grounded empirical papers that: a) situate particular assessment and feedback practices within a discipline; b) analyse how engagement with those assessment and feedback activities allows students to participate more fully or effectively within the disciplinary or professional community, and c) illuminate new aspects of assessment and feedback. We (Quinlan and Pitt, this issue) conclude this special issue with an article that draws on the five empirical papers to construct a taxonomy for advancing research on signature assessment and feedback practices.