Marking gets such a bad rep; it’s seen as something we essentially get our knuckles rapped for not keeping up with as opposed to a valuable tool to both measure and facilitate progress. But what also gets too quickly forgotten is that it’s not just for the teachers. Feedback can and should make students better learners and provide opportunities for self-reflection so they can develop and understand the ‘how’ and ‘why’ behind what leads to that development.
One of the many things the Metacognition book demonstrates is how exam or assessment wrappers can be used to help students understand their strengths and shortcomings. I’ve made a few of my own wrappers and use them with varying levels of complexity:
Simply does it
I teach both English and Media. Media requires a lot of technical knowledge and theory and because I was worried about overwhelming my Year 10s with so much information, I wanted to give them the tools to be able to identify areas of weakness and have a clear understanding on what they needed to improve on. After an assessment on content and theory, I grouped questions into overarching topics so students could ascertain areas of weakness. They went through their marked assessments and wrote the marks they got for each section and where they didn’t do so well and the reasons they thought might be behind this. Comments varied from: “I couldn’t remember xyz” and “I didn’t understand x” to “I got mixed up with x and y”. This reflection was used to give guidance on areas to study and create revision notes for holiday homework. This wrapper means students are explicitly aware of what they don’t know and are able to identify areas to target. This major barrier to learning is, if not broken, at least acknowledged and even though I could have easily told them what their target areas were, the process of writing down the marks and analysing the errors themselves while beginning to reason why they had occurred in the first place, builds far more metacognitive (or self-aware) and independent learners - and therefore more successful ones.
Student engagement
As mentioned earlier, it is so easy to forget who marking is for - by the time a student gets work back, it is thoroughly unlikely that they will remember what they wrote, what their thought process was at the time, much less where they might have gone wrong or struggled. After reading a few blogs of @Xris32 on feedback, I can’t believe my lack of insistence at having students stop and reread their work before applying feedback. How could they be expected to improve the piece of work if they can’t even remember it? Plus students get so wrapped up in teacher marking, that the focus on their own analysis and reflection is often completely lost.
Although the nature of giving feedback does require learners to review their work to act on it, to what extent do they engage with the piece as a whole, as opposed to get to the bits their feedback was aimed at and complete the follow-up task? Obviously my marking can’t focus on all the errors, it would be far too time-consuming for me and far too overwhelming for them, but upon reflection, giving feedback without getting them to reread is almost discouraging students from being metacognitive and being not only aware of their errors in general, but be able to spot them in their work and therefore stop making them.
Reflection
In order to address this, I now do all my assessment marking on a wrapper. This means their book is largely untouched and their first reflection of their work will be completely uninfluenced by my comments. The less reliant they are on me for feedback, the more they will be able to proofread and assess their own work in the moment of writing. I then get them to write a reflection. This could be self-assessment of their work after rereading it or where they felt they struggled at the time.
It’s very interesting to see that quite often they are aware of their mistakes when they are able to step away from their work and independently review it. Giving them this opportunity is really helping them in their future work as they are practising proofreading and assessing the quality of their work as well as identifying the areas they need to improve on. And even if they weren’t able to correctly self-assess their strengths and weaknesses, it is still important for them to compare what they initially thought of their work with my assessment of it. However, it is important to note that a process like this isn’t an instant win - it takes long-term implementation to see long-term results.
They then act on my feedback (Action After Feedback) using my coded system where they have guidance (already stuck in their books) on how to correct mistakes/ make the improvements their work needs. At this point, they have ascertained their strengths and weaknesses in their initial reflection, they have the information they need to develop their work and they have applied that information to make their work better. Finally, I have students write a Post-Feedback reflection. Knowing what they know now (having done their AAF) and considering what they now know that they didn’t then (in their Pre-feedback reflection), what would they tell their future selves before they next sit an assessment/ do a piece of sustained writing? This takes work and for most of my classes, I get them to write their answers on a mini-whiteboard first to save them writing responses like “I will write more” or a regurgitation of my own feedback. It gives me the chance to push their answers: my responses to their reflection are things like “Nope, too vague - how do you do that?” “If you knew how to do that, you would have initially - explain how to your future self.”
Building longevity
Short-lived reflection will not lead to long-term progress. This process needs to carry beyond just the feedback stages for it to be meaningful. The next time students are about to do an assessment, assessment preparation or even sustained writing, I have them go back through their work and re-read their post-feedback reflections and write “My Last EBI:” before they start their work. As previously mentioned, they already have a grid instructing them how to fix common errors and now they have been reminded of their prior mistake, already applied feedback to to fix this mistake once and they have instructions from both me and themselves to avoid doing the same thing again, chances of repeating the mistake are far less likely. Plus, it forces students to proofread their work - I often remind my students that in exam questions, they are far more likely to increase their marks by stopping and editing and improving their work than writing another paragraph of the exact same quality. Now they have a focus of what they are looking for, and are already armed with how to fix it. My Year 11s have got to a point where I can remind them to self-correct - my feedback should be used for the things they don’t know they are/aren’t doing - if they already know their errors, I can’t push them to the next stage.
Comments
Post a Comment