A new CRADLE Honorary Fellow appointed: Dr Juuso Nieminen
13 May 2022
CRADLE is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Juuso Henrik Nieminen, University of Hong Kong, as an Honorary Fellow. Currently, Dr Nieminen works as Assistant Professor at the Academic Unit of Social Contexts and Policies of Education (SCAPE), University of Hong Kong. Dr Nieminen’s research focuses on student experiences of assessment and feedback, student formation and inclusive assessment. In this blog post, Dr Nieminen briefly introduces his previous collaborations with the CRADLE team, and sheds light on future directions.
I have had the most amazing opportunity to collaborate with the CRADLE team. I am excited to think about the future opportunities this appointment brings with it. Our earlier collaborations have been quite formative for me for developing my thinking about the social underpinnings of assessment (and assessment research!).
I guess my interaction with CRADLE started while giving a talk about my PhD research project as a part of the CRADLE Seminar Series in 2019. By the way, I have never been that nervous about any presentation – not even about my PhD defence! Since then, we have collaborated with multiple article projects. After a lively discussion with Dr Joanna Tai at the Contemporary Approaches to Research (CAR) Symposium at Deakin in 2019 that initiated the project, we engaged in a further collaboration about student agency in feedback together with CRADLE’s Director Alfred Deakin Professor David Boud and Professor Michael Henderson from Monash University. Both stories include snacks at the lovely Deakin Downtown campus…
After finishing my student journey with the academic climax of a PhD defence, guided by my wonderful opponent Professor Margaret Bearman, I felt excited about proceeding in academia but unsure about my own position in the field of assessment research. With my background in mathematics, I was interested in quantitative research – but I also wanted to learn more about educational theory. Perhaps one does not need to choose? This productive struggle initiated a fabulous collaboration with Professor Margaret Bearman and Dr Joanna Tai as we asked: how is theory used in assessment and feedback research?
At the moment, I am working with several collaborative projects together with the CRADLE team. With Professor Margaret Bearman and Associate Professor Rola Ajjawi, we have sought to understand how and why “the digital” has been designed into assessment. The first piece of our brilliant collaboration was recently published: we formulated an organising framework to understand assessment design in the digital world. Another recent project has addressed student positioning in self-assessment. Stay tuned!
To find out more about Dr Nieminen’s research, please visit https://www.juusonieminen.com/
