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The purpose of this paper is to explore the enacted mental models, the types of thinking and action, of assessment held by faculty and staff in higher education.

This research approaches the question: in what ways are “learning outcomes assessment” understood (thinking) as part of a system and assessed in the individual’s work (practice)?” Interviews and concept maps were used to identify influences, descriptions of actions, and connections to environments for 12 participants, known to have engaged in learning outcomes assessment.

By connecting individual perspectives to broader organizational understanding, a goal of this research was to identify and analyze how educators understand and practice learning outcomes assessment in higher education. Influences on assessment presented in the literature are confirmed and several behavioral types are defined and categorized.

The findings focus attention on the ways individuals act on influences in systems of higher education. The findings yield opportunities for new ways to utilize assessment knowledge. The study is small and has implications for similar type institutions.

Faculty and staff can use these findings to create training and development protocols and/or adjust their own practices of assessment. Assessment professionals can apply findings to consulting on an array of assessment projects and with staff who have varying skill levels.

The ways in which assessment is practiced is deeply influenced by training but is also shaped heavily by current environments and accountability structures. Policies and practices related to such environments can make a difference in preparing for scaled-up assessment practices and projects.

This research offers insight into possible archetypes of assessment behaviors and presents applied influences on assessment.

This chapter explores issues of quality teaching, learning, and assessment in higher education courses from the perspective of teaching fully online (polysynchronous) courses in undergraduate and graduate programs in education at a technology university in Ontario, Canada. Online courses offer unique opportunities to capitalize on students’ and professors’ digital capabilities gained in out-of-school learning and apply them to an in-school, technology-enabled learning environment. The critical and reflective arguments in this paper are informed by theories of online learning and research on active learning pedagogies.

Digital technologies have opened new spaces for higher education which should be dedicated to creating high-quality learning environments and high-quality assessment. Moving a course online does not guarantee that students will be able to meet the course outcomes more readily, however, or that they will necessarily understand key concepts more easily than previously in the physically copresent course environments. All students in higher education need opportunities to seek, critique, and construct knowledge together and then transfer newly-acquired skills from their coursework to the worlds of work, service, and life. The emergence of new online learning spaces helps us to reexamine present higher education pedagogies in very deliberate ways to continue to maintain or to improve the quality of student learning in higher education.

In this chapter, active learning in fully online learning spaces is the broad theme through which teaching, learning, and assessment strategies are reconsidered. The key elements of our theoretical framework for active learning include (1) deliberate pedagogies to establish the online classroom environment; (2) student ownership of learning activities; and (3) high-quality assessment strategies.

This chapter will explore how assessment might look in next generation learning spaces where we have the potential to merge physical and virtual activities. Students now have ready access to a world of resources within their classroom and this fundamentally changes the nature of learning and assessment. The trend toward gamification of learning and assessment will be examined and the issue of assessment in new educational environments such as MOOCs will be explored. The impact of the semantic web (Web 3.0), where web objects and their context are all linked and objects have memory of how an individual student used them on previous occasions, will be discussed.

Next generation learning spaces encapsulate the affordances of both physical and virtual spaces and yet many assessment tasks are still designed as if students occupied only one of these spaces. Teachers will need to design more authentic, meaningful tasks that will engage students in using the full range of their capabilities and available resources, both physical and virtual. Students come together physically to engage in the social construction of their knowledge and can use the virtual spaces to broaden the social dimension of their learning environment.

Gamification of learning and assessment will require new approaches to defining tasks as teachers will need to decide how to incorporate diagnostic, formative, and summative assessment components within a more holistic educational environment. Game theory will be blended with learning theory in curriculum design and will result in the redesign of learning and assessment activities that are based on engagement (flow), user needs, and an evidence-centered design approach.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and demonstrate an evidence‐based scenario design framework for assessment‐based computer games.

The evidence‐based scenario design framework is presented and demonstrated by using BELLA, a new assessment‐based gaming environment aimed at supporting student learning of vocabulary and math. BELLA integrates assessment and learning into an interactive gaming system that includes written conversations, math activities, oral and written feedback in both English and Spanish, and a visible psychometric model that is used to adaptively select activities as well as feedback levels. This paper also reports on a usability study carried out in a public middle school in New York City.

The evidence‐based, scenario design framework proves to be instrumental in helping combine game and assessment requirements. BELLA demonstrates how advances in artificial intelligence in education, cognitive science, educational measurement, and video games can be harnessed and integrated into valid instructional tools for the classroom.

This paper provides initial evidence of the potential of these kinds of assessment‐based gaming tools to enhance teaching and learning. Future work involves exploring student learning effects in randomized controlled studies and comparing the internal assessment models to more traditional assessment instruments.

BELLA is the first step toward achieving engaging, assessment‐based, gaming environments for a variety of Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM)‐related areas with explicit support for English language learners.

The independence and well-being of people with dementia can be significantly influenced by the design of the physical environments around them. Several assessment tools exist to evaluate the dementia design quality of existing residential aged care facilities but, to date, none have been formally identified as suitable for use during the design process. This paper aims to examine the feasibility of re-purposing existing post-occupancy tools for use during the design process, while mapping the influence of design stages on resulting dementia design quality.

Literature searches identified audit tools for residential aged care settings. After reliability screening, three tools were analysed in-depth, mapping their suitability for use during the design process.

The study confirmed that existing tools can be re-purposed for design stage use and identified that early design stages have a larger influence on overall dementia design quality than previously thought.

Non-English language publications were not reviewed. Searches may not have identified other existing audit tools for residential care environments.

The ability to assess proposals at key stages of design may help improve the dementia design quality of future residential aged care environments – potentially enhancing the lives of ever-larger numbers of people with dementia.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this is the first known paper to consider formal design-stage evaluation of dementia design quality and the first to identify the relative influence of key stages of design on the resulting dementia design quality.

Internal control evaluation is a critical component of the overall audit process, mandated by auditing standards worldwide. These standards divide internal control structures into a number of elements, summarised as the control environment, information systems, and control procedures. Significant research exists as to auditors’ evaluations of internal controls. However, little work appears to consider the elements’ inter‐actions and relative significance. This study attempts to gauge the relative importance external auditors assign to the three elements. 94 practicing auditors evaluated internal control structures in two fictitious companies, one with strong internal control elements throughout, the other with one of the three set at a lower reliability level. The results indicate auditors consider control environment the most important element of internal control. The effect of weakening this element was that auditors assessed all three elements and overall evaluation as less reliable. Varying the other two elements did not have such significant effects. The findings carry ramifications for the auditing profession, particularly in drafting auditing standards on risk assessment.

The numerous spoil grounds brought about by mega transportation infrastructure projects which can be influenced by the ecological environment. To achieve better management of spoil grounds, this paper aims to assess their comprehensive risk levels and categorize them into different categories based on ecological environmental risks.

Based on analysis of the environmental characteristics of spoil grounds, this paper first comprehensively identified the ecological environmental risk factors and developed a risk assessment index system to quantitatively describe the comprehensive risk levels. Second, this paper proposed a comprehensive model to determine the risk assessment and categorization of spoil ground group in mega projects integrating improved projection pursuit clustering (PPC) method and K-means clustering algorithm. Finally, a case study of a spoil ground group (includes 50 spoil grounds) in a mega infrastructure project in western China is presented to demonstrate and validate the proposed method.

The results show that our proposed comprehensive model can efficiently assess and categorize the spoil grounds in the group based on their comprehensive ecological environmental risk. In addition, during the process of risk assessment and categorization of spoil grounds, it is necessary to distinguish between sensitive factors and nonsensitive factors. The differences between different categories of spoil grounds can be recognized based on nonsensitive factors, and high-risk spoil grounds which need to be focused more on can be identified according to sensitive factors.

This paper develops a comprehensive model of risk assessment and categorization of a group of spoil grounds based on their ecological environmental risks, which can provide a reference for the management of spoil grounds in mega projects.

This study aims to examine the impact of the transformation of an assessment on students’ performance and perspectives in an English for Academic Purposes course in Hong Kong. The assessment was changed from the traditional pen-and-paper mode to an unproctored online mode.

Using mixed methods, the research team analysed the differences between the assessment performances of those who took the course before the pandemic (n = 664) and those who took it during the pandemic (n = 702). Furthermore, focus group interviews were conducted with seven students regarding their perspectives on the unproctored assessment.

The results revealed that, although there were no major differences in the overall grades of the two groups, students who were assessed online during the pandemic performed significantly better in terms of their English use. Nevertheless, the shift to online assessment had several negative effects on the students.

Previous studies on unproctored online assessments (UOA) were concerned with potential learning quality issues, such as plagiarism and grade inflation. This study, however, provided empirical evidence that high-quality assessment delivery can be provided via UOA if the question types and assessment arrangements are carefully decided.

This study seeks to investigate the usefulness of occupant acceptance as a preliminary screen measure for offices' indoor air quality (IAQ). An effective alert indication of IAQ problems of a concerned indoor environment would help to promote good IAQ.

The study evaluates the hypothesis that the occupant dissatisfaction with the overall indoor environment provides an indication of IAQ problems. Hence, occupant dissatisfaction would be used as a screening parameter to identify problematic IAQ regarding some IAQ criteria in subsequent IAQ assessments. The hypothesis was tested with a database of regional cross‐sectional measurement in 490 offices within Hong Kong.

The occupants' dissatisfaction with the indoor environmental quality (IEQ) was correlated with the IAQ assessment results of nine IAQ assessment parameters regarding some IAQ criteria for air‐conditioned offices. At certain screening levels of predicted IEQ dissatisfaction, the performance of the proposed screening tool, indicating unsatisfactory office IAQ, was evaluated in terms of the test sensitivity, specificity, predictive values and Yule's Q statistics. The results showed that occupants' response to the indoor environment produced indications of unsatisfactory IAQ regarding the requirement of an “Excellent” office.

The subjective feelings of occupants are capable of identifying marked indoor environmental problems, but cannot identify the “marginal” IAQ problem cases.

The study shows the usefulness of using occupant acceptance to identify the unrecognized IAQ problems for air‐conditioned office environment. Using the identification model developed in the study, all the suspected cases were associated with a high chance of IAQ dissatisfaction and subsequent IAQ assessments were thus recommended.

The paper proposes a new identification method to identify the unrecognized IAQ problems which may indicate unsatisfactory IAQ. Also, the occupants' responses on the indoor environment are quantified.