Edinburgh Napier University

  This chapter focuses on an initiative which sought to promote and deepen students’ awareness, reflection and conceptual development with regard to assessment for learning (McDowell et al, 2006) in higher education. It involved developing a course which explicitly invited undergraduates to engage with, and contribute their voices to, published work on the scholarship of assessment (Rust, 2007). Students developed their own guides to AfL, many of which explicitly encouraged their target audience of student-readers to rethink and improve their own feedback practices. The chapter highlights the main themes and issues that students chose to focus upon as they sought to position their readers’ views of feedback within their understandings of AfL. Content analysis of the guides revealed that, while students recognised, appreciated and appeared to endorse the philosophical principles of assessment for learning they discerned in the literature, they tended to accentuate noticeably different elements, concepts and contexts than those which are prominent in the texts written by and for academics.