Contextualising Higher Education Assessment Task Words with An ‘Anti-Glossary’ Approach

Source: International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Volume 27, Issue 5, 2014, pages 604-625

This article presents the results from ‘staged’ focus groups with lecturers and students from the UK and China that created a forum for a dialogue, where many of key ‘generic’ assessment task words and their interpretations were talked about.

Results show very different interpretations, informed by factors such as ‘language’, ‘culture’ and ‘subject’.
The authors suggest that these factors be used in an ‘anti-glossary’ approach, which they describe here.

This approach counteracts the assumption that glossary definitions are explicit, and adopts a social constructivist contextualisation of the task words through teacher-led dialogue.