How can we move forward when we know so little about where we’ve been? Questions about assessment from a five year longitudinal study into learning in higher education

Education is an overt attempt to influence students, to change their habits of thought and patterns of engagement. Whilst recent decades have witnessed a rhetorical shift from discourses of education to discourses of learning, this shift has arguably been stimulated more by a desire to better understand the effects of educators’ activities than by a desire to embrace student articulations of the nature and purposes of ‘their’ learning. This paper will report on a longitudinal research study in higher education which was designed to explore such student articulations, in relation to both the texts that were produced for assessment, and the multiple contexts from which both texts and talk emerged.