Creative Teaching and Learning

Rethinking And Improving Feedback

Professor David Leat and Anders Davidsen get us to look again at formative assessment and feedback, drawing on evidence from across the world. They argue how feedback can be refined and improved, and provide examples and guidance.

The problem with marking!

We would like to suggest that teachers should do a bit less marking, allowing them to spend more time on curriculum development or other school priorities.

The meta-analysis of research on formative assessment from Black & Wiliam1 got the educational world, not least policy makers, very excited about its potential to raise attainment. This has been heightened, over time, by the Education Endowment Fund (EEF) top ranking for feedback in their list of interventions. In an era of hyper accountability, any lever to improve results is seized upon.2 This potential was strongly linked to the metaphor of ‘closing the gap’ which was brought to prominence especially by Royce Sadler3.

Thus, in theory, in the process of ‘self-regulation’, students have a sense of current performance and of desired improved performance and the strategies through which this may be done, all activated by teacher feedback. In practice this has become somewhat distorted and school policies have often demanded that marking includes a target, related to an attainment benchmark, and various procedures to encourage students to act upon the feedback. In some contexts this has become ritualistic.

The EEF (2018) guidance on feedback does introduce some caveats4. It acknowledged that the strongest effects are in reading, maths and ‘recall’, and recognising that it is challenging to improve the quality of feedback in the classroom, as indicated in an EEF pilot study where teachers used an action research approach. Harry Torrance suggested that it has been accepted as a ‘good thing’ to provide formative feedback via marking but went on to label some of the effects as ‘conformative’ and ‘deformative’5. Galton and MacBeath detailed the signs of teacher stress from the workload of marking, eroding the quality of home and personal life6.

<--- The article continues for users subscribed and signed in. --->

Enjoy unlimited digital access to Teaching Times.
Subscribe for £7 per month to read this and any other article
  • Single user
  • Access to all topics
  • Access to all knowledge banks
  • Access to all articles and blogs
Subscribe for the year for £70 and get 2 months free
  • Single user
  • Access to all topics
  • Access to all knowledge banks
  • Access to all articles and blogs