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.