According to Hattie, feedback provided via marking has an effect size of 0.791, with eight additional months’ progress potential for students2. The albatross like burden of marking3 means that good feedback is often difficult, with poor quality, generic, comments frequently seen4 & 5.
Students often do not act upon feedback and fail to make progress6 & 7, as they may not understand actions to improve based on vague comments like ‘explain this’; guidance steps on how to ‘explain’ have not been given4, 6 & 8. Marking individual student work therefore has limited effectiveness9 and is a high teacher effort, low student impact method that Kirby11 and Facer12 liken to a hornet.
Additionally, the DfE13 marking review noted how it has ‘become common practice for teachers to provide extensive written comments on every piece of work when there is very little evidence that this improves student outcomes in the long term, especially when ‘driving pupil progress… can often be achieved without extensive written dialogue or comments’.
The authors also reported that the ‘obsessive nature, depth, and frequency of marking was having a negative effect on teachers’ ability to prepare and deliver outstanding lessons’6. Therefore, it is important to find a low effort, high impact method of feedback that meets DfE guidelines that are not detrimental for teachers’ workload.
Low effort high impact
Whole class feedback (WCF) – a low effort, high impact, ‘butterfly’ method11 – is a solution. Most work that exists on whole class feedback (WCF) is published on teachers’ blogs where they reflect on the effectiveness of this strategy, both for students and teacher workload – the pros and cons are outlined in Table 1.