To help teachers make the most of the time they set aside for marking, the Education Endowment Foundation commissioned researchers at the Department of Education at the University of Oxford to review the evidence on written marking.
Workload
The report found that, despite the typical teacher spending nine hours marking pupils’ work each week, there is little evidence to show which strategies will have a positive effect on their pupils’ progress and which will not.
Although more research is needed to identify which marking strategies work, the researchers did identify some emerging findings. According to the report, teachers should focus on giving feedback rather than grades and set aside appropriate time in class to inform students of their mistakes and ways of improvement.
Sir Peter Lampl, chairman of the Education Endowment Foundation, said: “Smarter marking could save valuable teachers’ time while improving standards. This can make a real difference to how pupils learn and to teachers’ workload.”
Sir Kevan Collins, Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, added: “Today’s report should be a real wake-up call for policymakers and school leaders. Why are we asking our teachers to spend hours and hours each week on time-consuming marking strategies when there is very little evidence to tell us which of these have any impact on pupil attainment? Rather than relentlessly pursuing unproven and unsustainable approaches, a guiding principle might be to mark less, but mark better, informed by what the evidence tells us so far is likely to have the most impact.”
Strategy
The EEF commissioned a national survey of 1,382 teachers’ marking practices through the National Foundation for Educational Research’s Teacher Voice Omnibus. The teachers were asked about ten marking strategies of which the most commonly used was writing targets for improvement. Almost three-quarters (72%) of those surveyed reported that they did this on all or most pieces of work they mark.
However this approach hasn’t replaced the more traditional approach to marking, identifying and correcting errors, which over 50% of teachers said they did on all or most pieces of work they mark. The overall feeling was that previous research hadn’t determined the best method to provide students with the correct and appropriate feedback.
The report can be read in full, along with the recommendations, on the Education Endowment Foundation’s website: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/news/little-evidence-to-show-which-types-of-marking-improve-pupil-progress/
Comments are closed.