Why marking less might mean teachers can give more feedback

1. Less
marking,
more
feedback
David Didau
Collaboration in Education
Teaching & Learning Leeds - 2nd July 2016

2. What’s the difference
between marking and
feedback?

3. Why do we mark?
1. To grade and summatively assess
students’ performance
2. To help students to improve their current
level of performance
3. To motivate students to work harder
4. For accountability purposes.
Reading or marking?

4. -0.4
-0.2
0
0.2
0.4
0.6
0.8
Effectsize
Approaches
Average Effects
What’s the evidence?

5. What Hattie actually says
Feedback is one of the most powerful
influences on learning and achievement, but
this impact can be either positive or
negative.
Simply providing more feedback is not the
answer, because it is necessary to consider
the nature of the feedback, the timing, and how
the student ‘receives’ this feedback (or, better,
actively seeks the feedback)
The Power of Feedback (2007)

6. Distribution of feedback effects
Kluger & DeNisi (1996)

7. Getting feedback right is hard
Response type
Feedback indicates performance…
exceeds goal falls short of goal
Change behaviour Exert less effort Increase effort
Change goal Increase aspiration Reduce aspiration
Abandon goal Decide goal is too easy Decide goal is too hard
Reject feedback Feedback is ignored Feedback is ignored

8. Bjork on feedback
• Empirical evidence suggests that delaying,
reducing, and summarizing feedback can be
better for long-term learning than providing
immediate, trial-by-trial feedback.
• Numerous studies—some of them dating back
decades—have shown that frequent and
immediate feedback can, contrary to
intuition, degrade learning.
Learning vs Performance (2013)

9. A-Z or Satnav?

10. Specific, detailed,
immediate feedback
to encode success
Beginning of a
course
End of a
course
Delayed, reduced and
summarised feedback
to promote
memorisation
Feedback has been
internalised
The Feedback Continuum

11. Less marking, more feedback
• How long does it take to mark an essay?
• What happens to the marking after work
is returned?
• What could you do instead?

12. The problem with judgement
• There is no absolute judgment. All
judgments are comparisons of one thing
with another
• At best our judgments are ordinal. We can
place things in an order, but scarcely more
than this…
Donald Laming, Human Judgment: The Eye of the Beholder

13. The problem with judgement
Which is worst?
1. Forgetting to mark students’ books
2. Turning up late for a lesson
3. Cheating in an exam

14. The problem with judgement
Which is worst?
1. Punching a child
2. Embezzling money from the Pupil
Premium account
3. Cheating in an exam
Decontaminating Human Judgments
by Removing Sequential Dependencies

15. The task

16. Swindon Academy Yr 5 students

17. Signal vs noise?

18. Phds vs teachers

19. it was(?) the goblet lay close by, so close
he simply could not resist it. He
snatched it before ran for his life. And
even as he ran an idea came into his
head. This gift for his master, the(?)
goblet would be a perfect (?)
But the dragon through his perfect?
scales had felt the loss of the treasures.
When the dragon wakes but the skin is
as red as a tomato he is as big as a sky
scraper. to(?) and he smell of gold

21. Why do we need coordinates?

22. Proof of progress
Progress relative to other schools (Mean
GCSE grades 1-9
proofofprogress.co.uk

23. Key points
• Marking and feedback are not the same
thing
• Feedback is always powerful but not
always positive
• Less might sometimes be more
• Comparative judgement may be a better
use of teachers’ time

24. @LearningSpy
learningspy.co.uk
ddidau@gmail.com