10 Higher Education Pedagogy

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10 Higher Education Pedagogy

Kerry Shephard
10.1 Introduction
Three things have dominated my thinking in the context of this chapter.
The first relates to the advice given to me by one of the commissioning
editors: that the chapter should address what “someone with no prior back-
ground who is thinking of getting into some educational research (e.g., a com-
puting teacher) [should] know before they start.” The resulting conundrum
is how to summarize effectively and usefully several centuries of educational
research and thinking into one quite short chapter. The way that I have tried
to do this is to encourage readers to consider the nature of learning in higher
education as comprising “what we know,” “what skills we have to put our know-
ledge into effect,” and “what we choose to do with the knowledge and skills at
our disposal.” This division has certainly helped me to articulate what I know
about this topic and to provide computing education (CEd) researchers with
some key questions to punctuate their reading. The approach may even stimu-
late a research agenda for CEd researchers.
The second addresses the nature of educational research, with particular ref-
erence to researching educational practices from within a discipline. Boyer is
credited with reminding the academic world that academic tasks need to be
undertaken in a scholarly manner. Boyer went on to provide some ideas about
what scholarship actually entails and how we might, as a profession of schol-
arly teachers, undertake its evaluation or assessment. Boyer published his
important work on academic scholarship in 1990 and followed it in 1996 with
some observations on assessing scholarship (Boyer, 1990, 1996). Boyer identi-
fied four broad categorizations of scholarship (discovery, essentially research;
integration, emphasizing multidisciplinary approaches; application, generally
referred to nowadays as engagement; and teaching) and conceptualized these
as interacting with one another as a university professor goes about his or her
everyday work. Some might suggest that the focus of Boyer’s papers was to
address an increasing disconnect between university research, which by and
large was scholarly, and teaching, which was often less scholarly. For each of
his scholarships, Boyer suggested six standards: clear goals, adequate prepar-
ation/appropriate procedures, appropriate methods, significant results, effective
presentation, and reflective critique. Boyer went on to identify four approaches
that should in general terms be used to evaluate the quality of the scholarship
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Higher Education Pedagogy 277
involved: self-review, peer review, review of clients, and review by students. Boyer

envisaged, I think, the general principle that the sources of evaluative evidence
should be broadly based and systematic. Why is this important and relevant to
CEd researchers reading this chapter? Fundamentally, and from the perspective
of the scholarship of teaching and learning, this discourse describes a system
where professional higher education teachers also, and to a degree, research
their own teaching practice. Several authors have since taken Boyer’s proposals
and simplified them. Shulman, in particular, emphasized that scholarship in the
context of teaching requires that the work: must be made public; must be avail-
able for peer review and critique according to accepted standards; and must
be able to be reproduced and built on by other scholars (e.g., see Hutchings &
Shulman, 1999). Naturally, and in line with Boyer’s original standards, the
scholar involved also needs to build his or her practice on what has come before.
The development is therefore not simply in the practice of an individual, but in
that of the profession. From Boyer’s perspective, the construct of CEd research
is potentially problematic, as research into computer science education should
be something that all scholarly computer science teachers should be doing as a
matter of course. Nevertheless, if higher education teachers of computer science
do research their teaching practice, they are obliged to undertake this in essen-
tially the same way, and with the same level of scholarly integrity, as they under-
take their disciplinary computer science research.
The third is described here not, as it may seem at first glance, as obsequious
or flattering toward the discipline of computer science, but rather as an expres-
sion of concern. Not all higher education disciplines have well-developed, peda-
gogically focused research networks. I’ve often wondered if computer science
does because it needs to more than most. I have no doubt that with pedagogical
knowledge comes pedagogical power. If we are not smart about the way that we
teach our historians, our scientists, or our politicians, we trouble the world with
inadequate intellectuals. Our computer science graduates, on the other hand,
perhaps more now than ever before, enter a world where one bright idea could
change the world forever.
10.2 Learning Theories and Some Big Educational Ideas

Many teachers have heard, or have, opinions along the lines of,
“Learning theories? I’ve been teaching in universities for years now and I got
on perfectly well without theories, other than my own, of course. And those fine
scholars who taught me all those years ago didn’t appear to me to have great
insights into learning theories!” And what about jargon, or “education speak?”
Do we really need to know about active learning, lifelong learning, and peda-
gogy, or even epistemology, ontology, and epistemic shifts, to teach nowadays?
Fair enough –why make teaching more complicated than it need be? On the
other hand, learning and teaching in higher education are probably substan-
tially different from what they were in years gone by. Classes are generally larger
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and generally drawn from wider socioeconomic backgrounds. Expectations

are different, and in particular, nowadays a range of evaluative processes make
life difficult for higher education teachers who, in the opinion of students, are
not particularly good higher education teachers. And, in all probability, most
readers of this chapter will have some personal experience of being taught by
one or more teachers who not only had little educational theory to draw on,
but who also persisted in simply telling students what they needed to know to
pass the exams. Most readers of this chapter will wish to be better than those
teachers were. On balance, I think it is worth progressing with the idea that
knowledge about learning theories, and about new ideas in higher education
learning and teaching, will not necessarily do harm to those who teach.
We should start with a broad categorization of learning theories. When we
encounter a new term or idea, we should at least be able to understand where
it fits within the broad range of educational ideas. I think it is fair to say that
most of the terms that new higher education teachers encounter while learning
to teach in higher education fit within the broad category of constructivism.
The essence of constructivism is that learners develop their own mental models
of the world around them and new information is subjectively interpreted by
them, based on their prior personal experience. The consequence of thinking
of learning in a constructivist way is that knowledge is not necessarily uniform,
but varies from person to person. No matter what the teacher thinks he or she
is teaching, the learner may be learning something very different. Many of the
modern paradigms of learning and teaching in higher education have developed
from constructivist ways of thinking. These include problem-based learning,
enquiry-based learning, and the broad area of social learning.
Constructivism is highly fashionable in modern learning and teaching dis-
course and, in a historical sense, is situated within a relativist epistemology and
subjective ontology, and a long way from science. Its leading theorists include
Bruner and Vygotsky. It is especially important to mention Vygotsky because so
much of learning and teaching in higher education nowadays is considered to be
a social phenomenon. Social constructivism suggests that learning isn’t an indi-
vidual process, but involves social networks, with “culture” providing mediating
influences. In some respects, and as emphasized by Vygotsky, the interaction
between a teacher and the learner is itself a social interaction, and the differen-
tial impact on learning that the teacher has is undoubtedly an important con-
cept. Readers who wish to know more about these ideas might usefully consult
Lave and Wenger (1991) in exploration of social learning and communities of
practice.
Often seen as “the alternative” to constructivism, behaviorism is firmly
rooted within positivism and objectivism and is distinctly unfashionable in
many teaching and learning circles. Those with a grudge against behaviorism
tend to suggest that it involves simple transfer of information from teacher
to learner. More enlightened advocates of behaviorist ways of doing things
tend to emphasize that, in at least some circumstances, teachers do quite
like to identify what it is that the student is supposed to be learning and use
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this “intended learning outcome” as a means to consider the most appro-

priate forms of teaching activity that may enable the learner to achieve these
outcomes. Similarly, if learners are told what it is they are expected to learn,
they may in some circumstances be more self-motivated in achieving these
learning outcomes. Behaviorism also does contribute quite substantially to
traditional ways of identifying the roles and operation of feedback to students
on the basis of what they’ve learned so far and what they may need in order to
do better in future. Most of us have some experience of the personal benefits
of positive reinforcement –likely one of the most important features of behav-
iorism as applied to teaching. Readers of this chapter will understand that per-
sonally I find behaviorist ways of thinking about learning to be very useful in
some situations. Leading theorists include Skinner, and some would identify
Bloom and Krathwohl’s work on cognitive (knowledge and skills) and affective
(values and attitudes) learning domains to be derived from behaviorist ways of
thinking about learning (e.g., see Bloom, Hastings, & Madaus, 1971, as a useful
introduction to this way of thinking).
Our third category, cognitivism, somewhat pragmatically attempts to straddle
the gulf between these epistemological and ontological extremes. The leading
theorist for pragmatic ways of thinking about learning was Dewey, but Gagne
is thought to have contributed significantly to our current interpretations of
this category. Cognitivist interpretations of learning tend to focus on the cogni-
tive processes that contribute to the processing of information from experience
through to memory. An important contribution to this category was work in
the 1960s by psychologists in identifying concepts, processes, or structures, such
as short-term memory, working memory, and long-term memory. Some cogni-
tivist theorists in this area hypothesize close comparisons between the way that
the human brain works and the way that a computer works, although not being
an expert in either, I’m not convinced. Driscoll (2005) is credited with many of
the ideas that encourage teachers to facilitate learning in relation to cognitive
processing theory.
One problem in education nowadays stems from the multiplicity of its theor-
etical building blocks. The ideas and concepts that are widely used and coexist
in education nowadays do come from quite divergent theoretical backgrounds.
And as they work together, they evolve and merge, and sometimes it is difficult
to identify precisely the journey that they’ve undertaken. Many educators and
educational researchers nowadays are pragmatic about these matters. And being
a very pragmatic person myself, I am inclined to take aspects of these learning
theories that make sense to me and use them where I think they will be helpful
to me for understanding the nature of the teaching that I’m doing and of the
learning that I’m facilitating. Readers with this mind-set would do well to con-
sult Biggs and Tang (2007).
It does seem to me that CEd researchers reading this chapter would benefit by
reflecting on their use of educational theory and the links that they find between
these theories and the concepts that they make use of in their CEd research.
Research on learning and teaching that is not, at its heart, based on theory may
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not find the same acceptance outside of the particular discipline as research
that is.
So what’s that about big educational ideas?
10.2.1 Intended Learning Outcomes and Constructive Alignment

I doubt that it will be possible to identify the real origins of the ideas behind
constructive alignment, but the term itself was developed by John Biggs and is
in essence the theme that provides structure to Biggs’ textbooks on teaching for
learning at university (Biggs & Tang, 2007). Constructive alignment developed
from a substantial twentieth-century educational movement that nowadays is
identified as outcomes-based education (OBE) or outcomes-based teaching and
learning. In essence, the movement suggests that educators and education work
best when the educator concerned considers what, precisely, learners will be able
to do after they’ve been taught that they couldn’t do before they were taught.
Central to OBE is the intended learning outcome (ILO), and it is probably
fair to say that the adoption of ILOs has contributed more angst and frustration
to higher education teachers than has any other development in recent times.
Before OBE and ILOs, higher education teachers in most disciplines generally
described their teaching in terms of what the teacher does and what the teacher
will do, with a focus on the topics that will be lectured on or discussed in the
university course. Those who adopt OBE and ILOs do need to focus on the
learning that the students achieve and the processes that the students go through
in order to achieve this learning. Higher education teachers who have embraced
OBE and ILOs have needed either to learn this afresh or to transform the way
that they think about their teaching. In this process of transformation, higher
education teachers will inevitably need to think about the best approach that
teachers can adopt to encourage student learning and the best approach that
students can adopt to achieve this learning. These approaches are described as
teaching and learning approaches (TLAs). Then almost inevitably, higher edu-
cation teachers with this mind-set think about the best way to assure themselves,
their students, and other stakeholders in the system of the extent to which the
learners have learned the ILOs. And there we have constructive alignment –
constructive because the ideas focus on what the students do and learn, rather
than on what the teacher does; and alignment because there needs to be some
sort of alignment between the intended learning (or ILO), the teaching and
learning activity (or TLA), and the assessment that confirms that the students
have learned. For those who appreciate it, constructive alignment has provided
a great way to think about their teaching.
But not everyone appreciates the ILO and its contribution to constructive
alignment (Havnes & Prøitz, 2016). Reasons for objecting to an almost uni-
versal use of ILOs in some educational systems are quite diverse, but often are
based on analyses that deny the constructivist origins of these ideas and empha-
size the ILO’s behaviorist links. Many educators doubt, for example, that it is
possible to define and to measure outcomes clearly enough for the ideas behind
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constructive alignment to be useful. Certainly, many higher education teachers

have experiences where the teacher hopes that the students will learn some-
thing, but the complexity of the teaching and learning environment that they
are working in means that it is challenging to define what that something is and
to develop an assessment to ensure its learning. Constructive alignment can be
aspirational rather than obligatory.
It does seem to me that CEd researchers reading this chapter would benefit
by reflecting on their own assumptions about ILOs and OBE in their teaching
and CEd research, and to think deeply about the kinds of outcomes that they
anticipate or hope for. Sometimes this process results in constructively aligned
anticipation of what students will know and can do, but sometimes also earnest
hopes that are only tenuously related to what and how teaching is envisioned.
10.2.2 Phenomenography and Deep Approaches to Learning

Although substantial research into university teaching occurred throughout the
latter half of the twentieth century, higher education teachers began to feel the
force of this in the 1980s. A key contributor was undoubtedly phenomenography.
This developed initially as a research approach, essentially getting to grips with
the diversity of ways that teachers and learners conceptualized their activities
(Entwistle, 1997; Trigwell, 2006). A founding question related to the ways in
which students approached and conceptualized their learning as either a deep
approach or a surface approach. More recently, researchers in this domain
identified that some students in some situations take a strategic approach.
Phenomenography opened the way to a great deal of research that identified
that students approach learning tasks in different ways and that the ways that
teachers teach have some influence on the ways that students learn. Deeper
approaches to learning probably are better in some contexts than surface
approaches to learning, and teachers who teach in a way that encourages deeper
approaches to learning may, in some contexts, be better teachers.
10.2.3 Student-Centered Teaching

One good idea may well lead to another, and the next big educational idea that
we should consider attempts to put much late-twentieth-century educational
research into one easily managed concept. Teachers whose teaching encourages
students to take deep approaches to their learning by and large tend to empha-
size a particular range of teaching approaches. They may, as examples, involve
students in the design of their curriculum and frequently ask students for feed-
back on their teaching approaches. No doubt the teaching will be outcome-
oriented and constructively aligned, and it will encourage learning activities
that relate directly to the nature of the desired learning. Rather than students
listening in lectures to what the teacher tells them they should be doing, they will
spend most time actually doing these things. Teachers who put the students at
the center of learning rather than themselves tend to think about what students
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are expected to learn in the course, rather than what teachers hope to teach. The
teaching becomes student-centered rather than teacher-centered. O’Neill and
McMahon (2005) reviewed much of the relevant literature in this area.
Biggs (1999) describes two interacting variables that influence the effect-
iveness of learning. The first variable is the level of engagement adopted by
learners. At one level, they may be simply trying to memorize what is taught;
a relatively lowly cognitive process. At a higher cognitive level, they may be
involved in theorizing, reflecting, and abstracting about what has been taught.
The second variable is the extent to which the teaching method obliges learners
to be actively involved. Problem-based learning, for example, requires activity
by learners, whereas a standard instructional lecture may not. It is then possible
to describe how individual learners approach their learning in relation to these
two variables. Some will require very little teacher-induced activity to be highly
engaged with the task, while others will only engage when required to, such as
by the imposition of a required learning activity. Biggs maintains that “good
teaching is getting most students to use the higher cognitive level processes that
the more academic students use spontaneously” (Biggs, 1999, p. 4). The variable
that teachers have some control over is their teaching method, and many of the
teaching approaches that can be adopted to encourage learners to use higher-
cognitive-level processes fall into the category of learner-centered approaches to
teaching. Naturally, there is another complication, in that the teaching methods
likely to work best depend to a large extent on the circumstances.
10.2.4 Academic Development

Academic development units developed substantially within higher education
institutions throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Units were supported by educational
researchers and academic development specialists who had transferred from edu-
cation departments (which had previously had a focus on school-based education
with strong links to teacher training). Units also included some with an increasing
focus on technologies in education (arguably starting with the overhead projector,
but rapidly developing into the learning technologies). Land (2001) described a
range of different orientations to academic development that substantially describe
the varying nature of higher education development nowadays. Strong links are
nowadays made between academic development for new teachers (often involving
compulsory courses in higher education), changes in educational practice (fewer
lectures, more focus on student activity, clearly identified learning outcomes,
diverse assessments, much more formative assessment, more group work, and
some link to general educational outcomes or graduate attributes). Research that
ties this together includes that by Gibbs and Coffey (2004), who explored the extent
to which the application of these ideas actually improved student learning.
There are also strong links between educational ideas and ideas about life-
long learning and learning in less formal situations. CEd researchers and com-
puter science teachers reading this chapter may wish to ask themselves if their
teaching approaches will encourage learners to take responsibility for their own
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learning, and therefore be most likely to extend beyond the constraints of the
course, or degree, both temporally and spatially, as well as to ask what forms of
learning will be most valued by their students. In the long term, will students
most value the knowledge and skills that they are learning, or might students be
simultaneously learning and valuing opportunities to consider what they might
wish to do with this knowledge and these skills?
10.3 How Will You Teach? The Power of Feedback

There appears little doubt that a major predictor of both good teaching
and good learning is good feedback. Feedback is one of the most researched
aspects of education, and yet probably is one of the most challenging aspects of
higher education teaching in any discipline nowadays. Large group sizes, highly
diverse student groups, and heavy academic workloads tend to go against the
good intentions that many higher education teachers have to provide good feed-
back to their students. Feedback as a topic within educational research has also
changed significantly in recent years. Books on higher education teaching in the
last century may not have even mentioned feedback as a separate topic, including
it rather as an element of assessment with a focus on formative assessment, and
likely from a behaviorist theoretical standpoint, with an emphasis on correcting
aberrant learning. Nowadays, feedback is a topic in its own right, and its
importance reflects the extent to which it has been researched in recent years.
In some respects, how a university teacher conceptualizes the process of pro-
viding feedback to learners is likely a defining characteristic of how that teacher
conceptualizes both teaching and learning and their theoretical standpoint on
how students learn. Constructivism has had a significant impact on the nature
of feedback and research into feedback in recent years.
It may seem disrespectful to so much research by so many researchers who
came before, but it was Hattie and Timperley (2007) who developed a frame-
work for effective feedback, based on literally hundreds of meta-reviews of that
research, and so they have dominated thinking about feedback in education
most recently. Hattie and Timperley identified four levels of feedback: task level,
essentially how well tasks have been completed; process level, the extent to which
learners have understood the tasks to be completed; self-regulation level, the
extent to which learners have conceptualized their own learning; and self level,
feedback directed at the learners’ appreciation of themselves or their generalized
self-efficacy. These researchers went on to identify three major questions that
those who provide feedback and those who receive it could or perhaps should
be asking (“Where am I going?” in relation to the goals of learning; “How
am I doing?” in relation to, usually, some established standard or success cri-
terion; and “Where to next?” in relation to ongoing challenges). This framework
provides a highly focused resource for higher education teachers to help them
identify the nature of the feedback that they usually provide to students and
also the changes that they may make in the future.
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As with other frameworks, however, it obscures, or takes for granted, so much

that CEd researchers may be interested in. For example, implicit within the frame-
work is the idea that goals, perhaps specified as ILOs, are referenced as criteria
that all learners may be capable of achieving (albeit to varied standards). Much
of higher education, however, either openly or in some unthinking way, still
proceeds on the basis that not all students can possibly gain A+ grades and that
some unwritten regulation demands that only the best in any given cohort can get
the best grade. Questions like these demand that higher education teachers, and
those who research university teaching, reflect on their own points of view about
the nature of higher education and of higher education teaching. The feedback
that we actually provide to our students does not necessarily fit the Hattie and
Timperley framework. Similarly, there is an implicit assumption in much of this
research that students actually engage with the feedback that higher education
teachers provide them, but research by Price, Handley, and Millar (2011) confirms
that student engagement with feedback can be limited at several key stages.
Feedback has been reviewed in detail recently (Ott, Robins, & Shephard, 2016)
with a particular focus on CEd and on feedback at the self-regulation level.
10.4 Assessment, Evaluation, and Assurance of Learning

The terms “assessment” and “evaluation” have simple, everyday
meanings, and in some ways this everyday use downplays the complexity and
importance of assessment and evaluation in higher education. In addition, the
terms mean different things in different countries in a higher education sense. In
New Zealand and in much of Europe, assessment is what teachers do to indi-
vidual students to discover if they’ve learned what the teachers think they ought
to have learned. Assessments often involve examinations in which named indi-
viduals participate. Evaluation, on the other hand, in these settings is a broad-
brush approach ideally (from my perspective) applied by the teacher concerned
to discover if the learning and teaching processes worked as they were supposed
to. In general, if students are asked to contribute to an evaluation, they are
anonymous in the process. These terms are reversed in some other coun-
tries, making comparisons difficult at times. I’m increasingly using the term
“assurance of learning” because in some ways this combines both approaches.
Teachers need to assure themselves and others that the teaching that they’ve
been doing has been good enough to achieve the learning that was intended.
They also need to assure themselves that individual students have learned and
earned the academic credits that they expect.
10.4.1 Assessment
When it comes to assessment, those who appreciate the benefits of constructive
alignment, outcome-based assessment, and the ILO do have a substantial advan-
tage over other educators who do not. Advocates for constructive alignment and its
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logical consequential processes will have on their mind the nature of the intended
learning outcome involved when they design their assessment. They will, for
example, find it easier to describe learning outcomes in the cognitive domain than
in the affective domain, and similarly, find it far easier to describe lower-order cog-
nitive learning (such as remembering and understanding) than higher-order cogni-
tive learning (such as application, synthesis, and evaluation). This ease of describing
outcomes translates directly into ease of designing assessments that explore the
attainment of these outcomes. Formal, traditional written examinations are likely
unsurpassed as tools to assess what students have remembered or can explain.
Practical examinations involving computers are likely good tools to assess what
students can actually do with the computer. Neither are necessarily ideal tools to
allow students to demonstrate their higher-order cognitive skills such as creativity
and the ability to evaluate the worth of their knowledge. Nor are they necessarily
tools to enable students to demonstrate a range of outcomes involving both cog-
nitive and affective learning, such as teamwork or behaving ethically. Supervised
project work may provide better tools for these purposes.
The same framework helps teachers to address a range of other pedagogical
questions. Assessment theory demands that assessments are both valid (in that
they actually assess what it is that the students are supposed to have learned
and not something else) and reliable (in that a given student with a given level
of learning would likely achieve similarly in a different but similar assessment).
By constructively aligning the assessment with the ILO, teachers will find it rela-
tively straightforward to ensure validity (by ensuring that the assessment provides
learners with an opportunity to demonstrate their attainment of the learning
outcome) and reliability (by designing a range of assessments, all of which will
adequately assess the intended outcome). Alternative approaches do exist, of
course, and no doubt some higher education teachers do design their assessments
in the context of “let’s keep the field open and see what students produce.”
Higher education teachers often ask –sometimes in the context of the idea
that “assessment somehow drives learning” (rather than perhaps what we would
prefer as “learners’ interests drive learning” or “motivating teachers drives
learning”) –if all of the intended outcomes do need to be assessed, or just some
of them. For a course with many detailed intended outcomes, such an approach
could place substantial assessment burdens on both the teacher and student.
There is no doubt that higher education assessment nowadays is a more sub-
stantial enterprise than it was when I was a student. In days gone by, assessment
was addressed in end-of-year exams, whereas nowadays assessments in some uni-
versities, some subject areas, and some departments appear to occur every week
with assessed essays and assignments and project reports, as well as end-of-year
exams. The scenario plays out differently in different topics, but in general terms,
such a question brings into consideration additional assessment topics.
• Many intended outcomes are consequential on others and therefore appear
in nested arrangements. Formal assessments can focus on the major intended
outcomes and in so doing can address the minor, more basic outcomes.
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• Although the process of designing a complex set of ILOs may be a great asset
to a university teacher as they design their teaching and their assessments,
too much complexity will almost certainly detract from the authenticity of
the learning and teaching situation and of the assessment. Authenticity in
this context refers to the nature of the task that a professional might engage
in. Often this is in the form of a complex report or the creation of a product,
rather than the detail of a particular action. Teachers will need to assure them-
selves that the students are capable of undertaking the particular actions, but
they may do this best by designing their assessment to be as authentic, to the
professional, as possible. Biggs and Tang provide extensive advice on teaching
and assessing “functional knowledge” that, at its heart, needs to be authentic
(Biggs & Tang, 2007).
• Arguably, the majority of assessment in higher education ought to be forma-
tive in nature rather than summative. Formative assessment enables teachers
to provide feedback to students in a way that does not jeopardize their final
grade for any particular course. This feedback enables students to reassess
their mental models of whatever is being taught and to actually benefit from
the interaction that they are having with their teacher. In many cases, a sum-
mative assessment provides little opportunity for constructive feedback, and
there is substantial evidence that many students fail to engage with the feed-
back that comes with summative assessments (Price et al., 2011).
• How can we know that the individual asking for academic credit has created
the work being assessed? Personally, I think that this increasingly provides
higher education’s greatest challenge (Löfström et al., 2015).
10.4.2 Evaluation
For me, the obligation to evaluate my teaching is not part of a neoliberal plot
to commodify my contribution to higher education, nor a managerial process
imposed on me to demonstrate my effectiveness, although for others it may be
these things. For me, the evaluation of my teaching and of the consequences
of my teaching is a part of being a professional and is closely allied to my
commitment to scholarship. I’m interested in how well I do what I do and how
to improve what I do. A great deal of research has been undertaken on how best
to evaluate teaching in higher education, but in general, most researchers come to
the conclusion that the evaluation process should make use of a diverse range of
indicators. In my preferred order of importance, these are the following:
Self-evaluation: This category owes much to the work of Schön in developing
the idea of the reflective practitioner (Schön, 1983). Reflective practitioners
think deeply about what they’re doing and what they’ve done. This deep
thinking provides higher education teachers with a great deal of insight
into how they’re teaching and how effectively this is converted into
learning. Many professions require their professionals to keep portfolios,
and for many of us, the teaching portfolio is an important tool to help us
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gather evidence of what we’ve done and how well we have done it, as well
as the vehicle within which an evidence-based reflective commentary can
be situated. If our teaching isn’t effective, we should be the first to know
about it.
Peer evaluation: Teaching in higher education should ideally not be a lonely
pursuit. Most of us work in teams to support our students, and most of
us encourage teamwork in our teaching. Peer review, or peer evaluation, is
not always an easy option, but if done well, it can greatly contribute to an
effective evaluation of teaching. Peers do not have to attend our lectures.
They can comment on our course designs or on the feedback that we give
to our students. They can second-mark our assessments or meet with our
students to discuss any concerns they may have.
Outcome measures: No matter how wonderful the teaching may or may not
appear to be, if all of the students fail their exams, then surely something is
amiss. Learning outcomes are, in my view, an essential element of an evalu-
ative process. But as with other contributors to evaluation, there do need
to be some checks and balances. No matter how well-intentioned, if the
same university teacher designs the course, teaches the course, and assesses
the course, they may not be able to maintain the level of objectivity neces-
sary for a fair evaluation. On the other hand, in some higher education
situations nowadays, higher education teachers are under a great deal of
pressure to maintain class numbers and to boost retention figures. It does
appear to me that some form of external oversight is an essential element
of evaluative contributions based on outcome measures. External oversight
may be in the form of an external assessor, external examiner, or a regular
contribution from a peer.
Feedback from students: In my own institution, it often appears as if the
only data relevant to the evaluation of teaching are from student feed-
back. Students are routinely asked to comment on how well organized
the teacher was, how well they stimulated interest, and a myriad of other
concerns that may or may not be relevant to an evaluation of teaching. As
well as contributing to the teachers’ reflection on teaching, they also con-
tribute in a quite direct way to promotion applications. I offer the opinion
that they are divisive and incorrectly applied in this way. Nevertheless,
student feedback on their experiences is no doubt an important element
of an evaluation of teaching, and most teachers are pleased to hear stu-
dent opinions on many facets of the learning and teaching environment.
By and large, I suggest that students’ opinions on how well organized
the teacher was are more valuable than our students’ opinions on, as
examples, the content of the course or the academic level of this content.
There is, of course, a danger that too much power in the hands of groups
of students, who are not as committed to the discipline being studied as
the teachers are, will contribute to softening or even dumbing down of
the teaching. In these situations, there needs to be something else that
balances this effect.
288
288 SH E PH ARD
And, let us be clear: evaluation is not the end of a process. If anything, it is

simply a step on the way to scholarly teaching and an essential element of the
CEd researcher’s data set.
10.4.3 Assurance of Learning

For me, this is a relatively new but exciting concept. It certainly helps us to
overcome some of the tragic confusion that exists around the use of the terms
“assessment” and “evaluation” in different parts of the world, hence allowing
us to research these concepts on an international basis. It also forces us to iden-
tify the relationships that exist between assessment and evaluation, teachers and
learners, teaching and learning, and to articulate the responsibilities that each
of the stakeholders has within these dualities. Personally, I think it’s quite rea-
sonable for those who pay the fees, be they taxpayers or students, and those
who employ the graduates to ask the overriding question, “What have students
learned (to know, to do, or to be) that they didn’t know, couldn’t do, or wouldn’t
be before?” and to expect some relatively jargon-free answers.
Personally, I need to know more than the fact that 80 percent of the students
passed the course, of which 30 percent scored very highly, alongside a list of
topics taught in the curriculum. Such information would certainly not assure
me that the students have learned what they’re supposed to have learned. On the
way, I would like particular information that assures me that students have not
achieved a pass on the basis of good learning in some areas that compensates
for poor learning in others areas; and if this is the case, I do need the details.
For example, if the course or the program identifies good communication skills
as an outcome alongside skills in computer programming, I would like to be
assured that our excellent computer programmer also has reasonable commu-
nication skills; and if not, please do tell me just how bad they are at communi-
cating. Assurance of learning as a concept implies some degree of transparency
on behalf of the student, the teacher, and the institution.
10.5 Dispositions and Graduate Attributes

It has become fashionable nowadays for institutions to claim that their
teaching will foster learning that not only is directly relevant to a particular
discipline, but also is relevant to graduateness and citizenship. Our teaching
will encourage graduates to be honest, to have integrity, and to be socially and
environmentally responsible and globally competent. Our teaching will also
contribute to overcoming racial and gender biases in our societies. There are in
many cases clear links between what the institution expects of its graduates and
what professional bodies expect of their professionals, often described in the
form of professional values.
Within the world of science education, however, there are serious concerns
about the extent to which science education not only ignores these contributions,
289
but also deliberately or inadvertently discourages learners to consider, for

example, the social implications of their newfound knowledge (Cech, 2014).
Given the nature of computing and its development within our societies, it is
not unreasonable to suggest that these concerns may be particularly relevant to
computer science, to computer science teachers, and to CEd researchers.
For some teachers in higher education, the teaching should be as far removed
from values as is possible. Others identify upfront the values that they think
they exemplify and the absurdity of trying to teach in a values-free way (e.g., see
Shephard & Furnari, 2013). Others identify the hidden curriculum as an inev-
itable feature of any teaching that tries to obscure its values base. There is an
expanding literature on values education in higher education and on the roles of
role models in teaching and learning.
One area that fascinates me, and that may help CEd researchers to grapple
with learning and teaching in the affective domain, relates to critical thinking.
Critical thinking is often included in institutional lists of graduate attributes as
an all-round good thing. Critical thinking is often included within departmental
or discipline-specific curricula. Many higher education teachers describe their
teaching as encouraging critical thinking, as opposed to transmitting disciplinary
knowledge. But we would be unlikely to discover a generally accepted definition
of critical thinking or a clearly articulated and proven approach to teaching
critical thinking. The work of Facione is particularly relevant here (Facione,
1990, 2000). This researcher asked expert educators to reach a consensus on the
skills involved in critical thinking (these include interpretation, analysis, infer-
ence, evaluation, explanation, and self-regulation, several of which also appear
as key elements of other categorizations of learning). Facione’s research went
on to describe the dispositions that students need to possess in order to effect-
ively make use of the thinking skills that they are learning.
A key point for me is that the task for the teacher intent on teaching crit-
ical thinking skills involves far more than simply teaching skills. In order to
think critically, learners need to learn a range of dispositions in order to think
critically. These dispositions include being inquisitive, open-minded, analyt-
ical, self-confident, systematic, and truth-seeking –all outcomes firmly situated
within the affective domain –alongside a willingness to work in teams, to behave
in a culturally sensitive manner, to do the “right thing,” and to say no to the
“wrong thing.” As higher education teachers, we either will or will not concep-
tualize these dispositions as something to do with us, but as CEd researchers,
we may not have this luxury. Our research data may well be impacted by such
considerations.
Such dispositions are elements of long-standing models of learning and
teaching. Krathwohl, Bloom, and Masia’s (1988) affective domain of learning
includes an ability to listen, to respond in interactions with others, to demon-
strate attitudes or values appropriate to particular situations, to demonstrate
balance and consideration, and, at the highest level, to display a commitment
to principled practice on a day-to-day basis, alongside a willingness to revise
judgment and change behavior in the light of new evidence.
290
290 SH E PH ARD
It does seem to me that CEd researchers reading this chapter would benefit
by reflecting on their own assumptions about critical thinking and its related
dispositions and about their role in developing them. Do you think, as examples,
that computer science teachers should be teaching their students not only the
skills involved in truth-seeking, but also the obligation to seek the truth? Are
you open-minded about such matters and happy to teach your students to be
open-minded? Will you do this openly, or will it be hidden within your approach
to computer science, to research, to teaching, or to life?
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10 Higher Education Pedagogy

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10 Higher Education Pedagogy

Higher Education Pedagogy 277

involved: self-​review, peer review, review of clients, and review by students. Boyer

10.2 Learning Theories and Some Big Educational Ideas

and generally drawn from wider socioeconomic backgrounds. Expectations

Higher Education Pedagogy 279

this “intended learning outcome” as a means to consider the most appro-

10.2.1 Intended Learning Outcomes and Constructive Alignment

Higher Education Pedagogy 281

constructive alignment to be useful. Certainly, many higher education teachers

10.2.2 Phenomenography and Deep Approaches to Learning

10.2.3 Student-​Centered Teaching

10.2.4 Academic Development

Higher Education Pedagogy 283

10.3 How Will You Teach? The Power of Feedback

As with other frameworks, however, it obscures, or takes for granted, so much

10.4 Assessment, Evaluation, and Assurance of Learning

Higher Education Pedagogy 285

Higher Education Pedagogy 287

And, let us be clear: evaluation is not the end of a process. If anything, it is

10.4.3 Assurance of Learning

10.5 Dispositions and Graduate Attributes

Higher Education Pedagogy 289

but also deliberately or inadvertently discourages learners to consider, for

Higher Education Pedagogy 291

Land, R. (2001). Agency, context and change in academic development. International

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involved: self-review, peer review, review of clients, and review by students. Boyer

10.2 Learning Theories and Some Big Educational Ideas

10.2.3 Student-Centered Teaching