See what CRADLE staff took from HERDSA 2025

1 August 2025

The annual Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia (HERDSA) conference was held in Perth, Western Australia this year in early July. A number of the CRADLE team had the opportunity to attend HERDSA 2025 and present their research.

Read on for some reflections on what the team found at the conference.

Laura Hughes

Tegan Little, Joanna Tai, Phillip Dawson and I facilitated a pre-conference workshop on developing strategies for improving students’ feedback literacy. The attendees were from a range of backgrounds including face-to-face teaching and leaders of educators, which I think contributed to the valuable discussions that occurred. I enjoyed hearing about others’ research about student feedback literacy and learning behaviours in a variety of different learning contexts. Talking with like-minded individuals who are passionate about what they do in higher education is a bonus! Finding out about what others do, and lessons learned along the way inspires me to be a better researcher. 

Thomas Corbin

I was a busy bee at HERDSA this year, but how can anyone not be with so many great talks and fantastic people around? As well as talking to brilliant people, and seeing some amazing presentations, I also gave four talks. I was fortunate enough to be invited onto the closing plenary, I gave two roundtables with Phill Dawson, including one on our recent paper ‘Talk is Cheap’, and finally I presented a seminar on my work regarding student uses of GenAI to engage with academic reading. Speaking as part of the closing plenary was fantastic, and a real honour to be invited on. The theme was ‘not another GenAI panel’, and I think we lived up to that, at least in exploring some less discussed (but no less important) issues.  

Joanna Tai

I was proud to present two papers on behalf of the team who worked on the Negotiating University Study project which focused on equity students’ experiences at university over time. I shared a new analysis on experiences of groupwork, and also revisited our previous paper which used the “house of cards” metaphor, inviting the audience to consider how this metaphor helps us understand and move towards supporting student success. The conference was also a great opportunity to meet up with colleagues I’d long admired online, and find out who shares an interest in feedback literacy. 

Jack Walton

I was really glad to present on behalf of CRADLE’s wider GenAI team, to share some of our newest findings around the ways students work with AI on assessment. The big takeaway: students’ interactions with AI are inherently contradictory. What supports learning for some can be disruptive for others, and the trade-offs are difficult to predict (we hope to have the paper out soon!). The best parts of the conference experience for me, as always, are the serendipitous conversations that happen in the coffee line—seeing each other face-to-face is sometimes a rare opportunity, and it’s those spill-over conversations that really made the conference for me. 

Phill Dawson

HERDSA came just as I’ve been re-thinking what the role of academic travel is in my life. I have the privilege of doing a fair bit of it, but I sometimes ask: could this all have been a Zoom during the day, and me hanging out with my kids in the evening? I set out to get from HERDSA those things that couldn’t be Zoomed so easily. I put a post up on LinkedIn explicitly saying: I’m very keen to talk with anyone, if you see me on my own, come up and chat, don’t be scared. It worked. My best bits were in the coffee breaks and when I skipped sessions (scandalous I know) to talk with people who were doing interesting things. I’ve been publishing some papers people don’t necessarily agree with in recent years (actually, make that, since I got started in academia), and those 1:1 chats are a great way to sharpen things up and get closer towards representations of ideas that everyone can buy into.

That’s not to say I didn’t see any fascinating sessions. If I had to pick a non-CRADLE highlight, it’d be Guy Curtis and his presentation on GenAI misuse prevalence in assessment, and if academic integrity education really does anything. Big dataset, and I don’t want to spoil it ahead of him publishing, but depending on where you sit they’re either vindicating or surprising results.