Karen Smyth

The benefits of students learning about critical evaluation rather than being summatively judged

This paper explores how student reflection on assessment procedures is a necessary part of the learning experience, and how such reflection can be supported in our teaching practices. Attention is paid to how discussion and analysis of assessment practices can be prioritized in the opening stages of a course. Further exploration reveals the importance of teaching students the differences in rationale behind summative and formative methods, and ways to do this. The advantages of conceptual marking, how written and verbal feedback should not be the end stage but used as a building block for student reflection, roles for self‐ and peer assessment and particular issues concerning oral assessment are all investigated.This paper explores how student reflection on assessment procedures is a necessary part of the learning experience, and how such reflection can be supported in our teaching practices. Attention is paid to how discussion and analysis of assessment practices can be prioritized in the opening stages of a course. Further exploration reveals the importance of teaching students the differences in rationale behind summative and formative methods, and ways to do this. The advantages of conceptual marking, how written and verbal feedback should not be the end stage but used as a building block for student reflection, roles for self‐ and peer assessment and particular issues concerning oral assessment are all investigated.

Enhancing the agency of the listener: introducing reception theory in a lecture

This article explores a teaching approach that aims to engage learners more fully in the deep learning process that is characterised by the development of critical thinking skills. The concept of critical thinking skills is reconsidered in the context of the need to shift focus away from teaching teachers about learning to teaching students about learning. A cross‐disciplinary approach is used, with the educational theory of interactional learning being placed alongside the literary theory of reception study. The result of placing these hitherto unconnected theories side by side is to open up a debate concerning the rhetoric we use when discussing the value of learning, by introducing a new discourse concerning ‘dialogue strategies’. This case study of the potentials in using dialogue strategies during a lecture illustrates how students’ conceptual sophistication in cognitive thinking is achieved by asking them to scrutinise their own involvement in the learning experience.

Reading Misreadings in Thomas Hoccleve's Series

‘‘for a tyme be.’’ The need to demarcate states of time is not their concern, and hence the abstract time referent. The friends’ focus is not on strict ‘‘chaunge and variance’’ between states of time, but on their belief in the recurring cycle of time, for although they admit he is well now, they assume his illness shall return. Thus, Thomas views each period of time as episodic whereas the friends view time states as a recurring cycle. It is interesting to note that Donald Wilcox has identified the Reading Misreadings in Thomas Hoccleve’s Series 9

Changing Times in the Cultural Discourse of Late Medieval England

The author reassesses critical assumptions concerning ways to read time perceptions in the Middle Ages. A comprehensive synthesis of existing scholarship is offered as a means to scrutinize the multiple methods used by modern commentators and as a means to demonstrate the complexity and interconnectivity of cultural discourse in the medieval period. An integration of specialist approaches results in an essay with a wide coverage of primary sources. The focus on English examples— with close readings of how literary texts, religious writings, church records, legal documents, chronicles, letters, the computus genre, and the role of mnemonics— reveals the multiplicity of ways by which collective and individual attitudes towards time are instilled, communicated, explored, developed, confused, and at times subverted, in cultural discourse. This reading of timepieces as cultural narratives offers a new dimension in the study of medieval expressions of time. The essay also indicates possible directions for future...