The EEF Review – A marked improvement?
The Education Endowment Foundation in the UK has published a review of current research on marking and feedback. Their review brings some welcome insights into practices teachers could adopt, and those teachers could reject without negative impact. Below I summarise the findings and the take home messages for teachers.
Thoroughness
Thoroughness revolves around the frequency of marking and how in depth it was marked. The review found that teachers could abandon ‘tick and flick’ without a noticeable fall in the effectiveness of the marking. Therefore, if you are a teacher that feels they should ‘acknowledge work’ with ticks and indiscriminate ‘good’s dotted around the page then you can abandon this for two reasons.
The first is that if you are ticking the work, you are in reality suggesting you have read it and approve. But do you? If there are mistakes in the work and we have just skim read it, you may not pick up on those. You have then ticked the work suggesting to the pupil it is correct, but it isn’t. So what did you mean? Perhaps what you meant, isn’t quite worth writing anything?
Secondly, good quality feedback is definitely time-consuming. Let’s all abandon the strategies, no matter how engrained, that simply add no value to our practice. The traditional ‘tick and flick’ is a time-saving strategy you can stop today!
Frequency and Speed
Another element reviewed by the EEF / Oxford Review is the speed with which marking is returned after being completed by students. The report found little quality evidence regarding this which is unfortunate as it is something many students would describe as important to them. It did find that work given back the following lesson to it being completed had a positive impact. It is worth mentioning however, it was advised that the quality of marking and its precision should always be considered before attempting to return poorly marked work as quickly as possible.
Grading
There were some small-scale reports which reviewed the effects of grading as feedback. There was no evidence that grading student work was effective, except for one study in Sweden which found a small positive effect for girls. This was explained as the girls appreciating the validation of their, often underestimated, abilities.
Grading work with written feedback can often hamper the progress made as a result of the feedback. This is due to the students focusing on their performance in terms of the grade, but not the comments for improvement. Indeed, withholding grades alongside feedback may not impact students greatly.
Pupil Response
This report found that in general, students can find acting upon feedback difficult. Sometimes, as the subject specialists, we may use terms that we consider tacit, but students may struggle to understand. what is being asked? The question is, though, how can we facilitate this best?
Dialogic marking is an emerging practice where students are asked to converse with the teacher in their exercise books. This form of student feedback has not been researched to any great extent, and so the effectiveness of this practice cannot be known. The report does recommend that if this practice is to be improved, then students should be allowed dedicated reflection time in the lesson.
Corrections
When corrections were considered in the report, it was particularly interesting that coded feedback was found to be as beneficial as written comments. This could be a really time-efficient way of allowing teachers to feedback to their students.
Conclusion
In conclusion, it is clear the review has many positive messages for teachers. If we can continue to move the workload and effectiveness discussion around feedback forward, then feedback can be made to work for students and teachers, not the other way around.
mbwtaylor 