This paper explores assessment and learning in a way that blurs their boundaries. The notion of assessment as learning (AaL) is offered as an aspect of formative assessment (assessment for learning). It considers how pupils self-regulate their own learning, and in so doing make complex decisions about how they use feedback and engage with the learning priorities of the classroom. Discussion is framed from a sociocultural stance, yet challenges some of the perspectives that have widely become accepted. It offers three new views to help explore the concept of AaL: understanding feedback; understanding the learning gap; and exploring vocabularies of assessment. Pragmatically, the ideas examined suggest that teachers may need to consider less about focused and directive feedback, but more about how learners interpret and understand feedback from their selfregulatory and self-productive identities and how vocabularies for assessment can be more collaboratively shared in learning contexts.

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This paper explores the impact of lecturers' individual current doctoral study on their own and collective constructions of self in a changing Higher Education (HE) policy context. It focuses on how lecturers, drawn from a professional knowledge background, make sense of new institutional requirements for new lectures to have doctorates. The lecturers themselves, through 'facilitated collaborative auto-ethnography', generate the substantial data and analysis for this research. This study exposes the enormous pressure of the doctorate on their lives and reveals different ways in which they resist particular forms of language, affiliations and positioning within their institution. However, of particular significance in this study is their own agency and collective voice, through using their developing cultural tools of research to 'be' researchers, in and beyond their own doctoral studies, in order to understand their own changing identities within HE. The study therefore reveals complex, contradictory and unexpected responses to HE policy.

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