Documentary linguistics is new and distinctive enough that some linguists and other participants in academic reviews may be uncertain about how to assess its outputs. We recommend specific strategies for assessing documentary linguistic scholarship in academic review contexts, based on a brief description of the field for the benefit of colleagues in other areas.

This paper advocates a holistic approach to assessing international relations in undergraduate education, which revolves around: (a) essays and (b) active learning-related tasks, such as simulation reflective statements/reports and performance. The paper argues that, on the one hand, academic essays are far from irrelevant and it is difficult to overestimate their practical significance. On the other hand, active learning-related tasks are best utilised as a supplementary assessment, expanding the students’ range of transferable skills. The assessment structure advocated in this paper results from a holistic approach to assessment design, which includes teacher’s own experience, familiarity with pedagogical scholarship and input from students. This last element is the least common even though it makes sense to understand how students see their own assessment. To that end, the paper shares the results of a pilot project run at one of the UK universities, which engaged students as partners in rethinking their assessment.

During the last two decades, there have been various attempts at measuring and assessing the health of civil society. Some have focused almost exclusively on ‘counting’ the nonprofit, while others have assessed the strength of nongovernmental organizations. Yet, these sectors are just a small part of a much larger environment. Moreover, they are the result of Western conceptualizations of civil society, thus not very helpful for one to understand civic participation in non-Western settings. Taking stock of these fundamental issues, this article presents the conceptual framework and methodology of a new global index to measure the ‘enabling environment’ of civil society, rather than its forms and institutional contours. Given the inherent diversity of civil societies worldwide, which defies any attempt at developing predetermined definitions, understanding the conditions that support civic participation becomes the most important objective for those interested in promoting a strong civil society arena. The index was launched by CIVICUS in late 2013 with the name of enabling environment index and covers over 200 countries and territories, making it the most ambitious attempt ever made at measuring civil society worldwide.

There is now a rich pedagogical literature that attests to the absolute centrality of assessment and feedback in effective student learning at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. And yet – despite this consensus in the pedagogical literature over the crucial importance of assessment and feedback – they are not, it seems, fulfilling their purpose or potential for students or lecturers alike. This symposium starts from the premise that assessment and feedback matter, that they are not working at present and that we need to find ways to do them differently. The symposium brings together five original articles from contributors who all want to explore alternative ways of thinking about, and doing, assessment and/or feedback so that they work better both for our students and for us as their lecturers.

This article contends that the creation of a legacy by students enables them to situate their time and experiences at university within their broader life goals and expectations. Legacy learning refers to the act of creating an archive or artefact for the benefit of posterity; collating, collecting and creating a virtual or tangible article, or objet, for successive cohorts to utilise as a learning resource. It is also a tangible product that students may use to demonstrate their skills to prospective employers; something to take away with them from the process of learning. At the heart of the concept are two key factors: collaboration and the process of self-reflection. This article illustrates legacy learning through the examination of a final year module on Asia for which small groups of students had to produce a documentary video and individual self-reflection paper. Although the putative goal of the endeavour was envisioned as the realisation of the documentary itself, the self-reflection exercise by students suggests that the underlying learning value of the exercise may in fact rest in the self-realisation of the learner.

In this symposium, we invite political science instructors to consider reflection as a useful pedagogic resource for achieving complex long-term educational goals. The authors of this collection have found reflection to be a suitable response to different teaching challenges, such as helping students achieve a nuanced understanding of social processes and decision-making, transfer knowledge between courses and gain self-awareness as active participants in learning. The three papers composing this symposium focus on different formats of reflection: a learning diary; reflection accompanying board games used as a teaching exercise; and short reflective assignments about connections between courses in a study programme. We present and discuss the design and implementation of reflective activities in the undergraduate political science curriculum, expose the strengths and weaknesses of using reflection and provide advice to instructors interested in using this teaching tool.

Dissatisfied with traditional grading, we developed a grading system to directly assess whether students have mastered course material. We identified the set of skills students need to master in a course and provided multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate mastery of each skill. We describe in detail how we implemented the system for two undergraduate courses, Introductory Phonetics and Phonology I. Our goals were to decrease student stress, increase student learning and make students' study efforts more effective, increase students' metacognitive awareness, promote a growth mindset, encourage students to aim for mastery rather than partial credit, be fairer to students facing structural and institutional disadvantages, reduce our time spent on grading, and facilitate complying with new accreditation requirements. Our own reflections and student feedback indicate that many of these goals were met.

Increasingly, simulation-based teaching and learning is finding a place within politics and international relations (IR) programmes. The majority of literature on this style of teaching and learning has positioned it as both an aid to content delivery and as a response to the many challenges facing contemporary higher education. Little guidance is given, however, to the practical considerations of using simulations as a component of assessment or as informing assessed tasks. This article draws upon the experience of the authors in adapting the well-established Model United Nations (MUN) simulation programme for delivery as an assessed module at a British university. This has involved balancing institutional teaching, assessment and validation requirements with the successful simulation of diplomatic practice. The article introduces the MUN simulation and explores the extant pedagogic literature encouraging the use of simulation-based learning in IR curricula, before moving on to provide an overview of the rationale for the various decisions the authors have made in adapting the simulation for delivery as an assessed curriculum component. The article asserts the value of introducing assessed simulations within IR coursework and provides guidance on how student performance in pedagogic simulations might best be assessed.

This article reviews the work of the American Political Science Association in support of teaching and learning within the discipline. It draws from a variety of sources in which this agenda is elaborated, with three goals in mind: to characterise the wide variety of activities the Association has in place, to touch on the history of those efforts, and to put these activities into the broader context of the role of a learned society.

This article evaluates the use of audio feedback on assignments through the case study of a politics course and argues that audio feedback provides a more personal feel to feedback. Criticism, it appears, is easier to accept in the spoken word. In addition, the article highlights the chief practical benefit of audio feedback, namely that it reduces the overall time spent by lecturers in providing comments. But while the article is positive in favour of audio feedback, it also discusses some potential challenges that include anonymous marking and the fact that one size does not fit all, with different students preferring different types of feedback. Finally, the article identifies a number of practical tips that relate to the adoption of this method of feedback.

This study investigates whether reflective journals can stimulate students to reflect on their learning and ultimately to make a conceptual change in understanding international relations concepts and problems. The article reports on the experience of using journaling in two courses by triangulating data from analysis of student journals, assignments, feedback forms and a teacher’s journal. It details the documented benefits and drawbacks of journal-keeping for student learning, setting it into the framework of the existing literature on reflective learning and conceptual change. The article concludes with recommendations for how to make journals an effective learning tool.

Students of ‘conventional’ academic disciplines can struggle to determine the extent of their employability. Work-based modules offer a potential solution to this issue. That these type of modules give students the opportunity to apply their knowledge and realise the scope of possible employment opportunities afforded by their degree is commonly accepted, but real issues arise in tackling the assessment of ‘on the job’ experiential learning, particularly in the area of politics. This article outlines an integrated and iterative approach to assessment, starting with the design of the component parts of the module, moving on consider the role played by simple tools such as the framing of key narratives, the development of placement diaries incorporating SWOT analysis and the use of the Politics and International Relations Subject Benchmark Statement. The importance of integrating the module design with the final assessment processes is described, and some examples are offered of how students have described the ways in which the module has enabled them to bridge the gap between theory and practice, and scholarship and employability.

Case-based learning (also known as problem-based learning and by a variety of other names) is well established in disciplines like medicine, business and law. Drawing on experience from these and other fields, a project at the University of Huddersfield is developing case-based learning for use in politics. This article describes the processes of creating and using case-based learning resources, and examines what is already being done in this area.

Research undertaken on student feedback has pointed to the difficulties that students have in understanding written feedback. However, little attention has been given to understanding student views on verbal feedback. This article aims to fill this gap by reporting on the findings of verbal feedback practices among 114 History, Politics and International Relations students obtained from a questionnaire survey. These findings were supported by five in-depth semi-structured interviews. The findings show variance in student views with regard to different aspects of verbal feedback. The research outlines a number of suggestions that assist in developing verbal feedback opportunities further. It is argued that ‘feedback-dialogues’ provide a mechanism for improving student understanding of feedback.

The article argues that problem-based learning, through the creative use of simulations, can raise student engagement and enhance student performance. Specifically, it discusses two simulations that were used in a recent European Union Politics course, one involving a Council Simulation of the Chocolate Directive and the other a simulation of the European Parliament. The simulations were assessed through a combination of reflective student essays, pre-post tests and other in-class student work.

Despite attempts by higher education institutions to improve the quality of feedback on assessed work, dissatisfaction expressed by students remains visible. This article draws upon the preliminary findings of a Higher Education Academy Collaborative Research Project on assessment feedback within two large political science and international relations departments. It offers a critical review of current feedback practices and processes and identifies four key issues – negativity, transferability, intelligibility, and consistency – that require attention in order to deliver more effective assessment feedback. The article also suggests practical ways forward in addressing these issues, highlighting in particular the importance of both structure and timing in helping to produce high-quality feedback efficiently.

Group work is an essential aspect of our personal, educational and professional development, yet it is not a common method of assessment in Politics and International Relations departments at British Universities. This study explores how instructors can effectively engage students in assessed group work to help them develop an appropriate mix of skills by focusing on collaborative learning and scaffolding. It draws on primary sources collected from a final year Politics and International Relations module at a top-ranking British University. Group work assessment is discussed in relation to three points of comparison: cooperative and collaborative learning, formative and summative assessment, and individual and group achievement rates. The key findings suggest that (a) students have the ability to learn collaboratively with minimum “scaffolding” in place and prefer being empowered to self-manage their respective groups and arising problems and (b) formative group assignments and intermediary feedback are perceived by students as key in supporting group performance. The findings and proposed recommendations provide a guide for educators interested in diversifying their assessment methods and supporting students’ development.

A more flexible approach to structuring study programmes across European universities enables students to choose which courses to take, in which combination and order. This flexibility is a step towards fuller self-reliance for students as learners. However, it can also reduce the coherence of studies and fragment the learning experience into units (courses or modules). To prevent the fragmentation and encapsulation of knowledge, we devised a reflective writing exercise we called ‘Building Bridges’. It requires students to detect and present connections between courses in their study programme, relevant to their personal learning progress. We carried out the exercise in three courses in a highly flexible modular undergraduate study programme at the University of Freiburg, Germany. In 54 submitted assignments, students on average identified 3.6 relevant connections per assignment of 700 words. Based on the responses, we identified six types of logical connections between courses: similarity, difference, development, challenge, application and contextualisation. Grading the assignment does not seem to influence the reflection. We conclude that, even with minimal guidance, students are able to build multiple connections between courses. Yet, students found it challenging to present connections between courses in the framework of their individual learning pathway, personal academic interests and goals. These tasks require more training and support.