How to Promote Student Progress Through Marking

When you ask almost any teacher what the worse part of the job is, the answer your most likely to get is MARKING!  Unfortunately marking is, and will remain an important tool used to assess student progress and as a record demonstrating the student that students are making.  Over the years my opinion of marking has swayed from one end of the usefulness spectrum to the other more times than I can remember.  The question that I ask myself time and again is “who are we marking for?”  I think the answer must be, we’re marking for the students, so shouldn’t be wasting time constantly highlighting specific marked work in books just in case either Ofsted or SLT want to look at the books.

The phrase that seems to be summing up my year is “if it’s not going to improve progress, should it be done?”  The answer nine times out of ten has been no!  When marking, and assessing students it must be as a focus point to help improve progress rather than just for the sake of it because it’s expected.  Below, I have discussed some of my thoughts on marking and what I do to use marking to help drive progress.  At this point I feel that I must admit that few these ideas started as my own but, they all come together to work for me.

Plan for opportunities to mark:  If marking is to be truly effective it needs to be planned for.  I find that time and time again I use the same few tricks to do this.  The first and primary method that I use is to start my planning by looking at an exam question, and work back from it.  Those of you who are need to the profession may have heard this call “framing your lesson around an inquiry question.”  As a Science teacher, when starting my planning, I will often start with a six-mark question that students will need to be able to answer by the end of the lesson.  I then build my lesson around that question then assess student’s response to the question to check student’s progress at the end of the lesson.  If students can answer it there’s a good chance that they have understood what they have been taught.

Mark to help students progress:  In the past I’ve been guilty of marking because it was what was expected.  The longer I’ve been a teacher the more I’ve come to believe that this was a waste of my time as a marker and at the same time pointless for students.  Marking should always be carried out with a focus on improving student progress.  The way that I do this is to use yellow box marking.  There’s lots out there about yellow box marking but here are a few simple ways that it can be used. 

If you set students to work through several exam questions, you can leave targeted feedback on how they can improve their answer therefore increase their progress.  Draw a yellow box somewhere close to the exam question where the student can make the improvement which you can then check after.  The targeted feedback you leave can also take a few different looks.  You could rephrase the question or highlight specific parts of the question that students need to improve.  If the answer has gained all the marks you can give students a short extension question to further their understanding of the concept that the question is based on.

At the beginning of this piece I talked about six mark questions.  Whilst that type of question is specific to Science, this use of yellow box marking would be applicable to any long answer or essay question.  Once you have marked the question give students a few specific targets on what they need to do to improve their answer then in a yellow box get them to redo their answer.  You can then remark it, and hopefully it should show students that they have made progress.

Peer marking:  Peer marking is often a contentious method. Using it relies on students understanding what the correct answer is and that they will be able to mark answer without being overly harsh or generous.  The other major problem with peer marking is the quality of the feedback that they give each other.  If the feedback they give doesn’t aid progress has it been worth the time it has taken them to give it?  The way that I think effective peer marking should be carried out follows a few key concepts.

Firstly, if I’m getting students to do any peer marking I get them to do it in green pen.  If students do their marking in green it is easy for them to distinguish between their marking and mine.  It also gives an opportunity to easily comment and give feedback on the quality of peer feedback.

When getting students to make each other’s work don’t presume that they will automatically know how to do it.  It’s been my experience that most students have no idea how to mark a piece of work.  The way to get around this is to give students a strict framework to mark to.  If you want students to mark for SPAG, give them the key words that need to be spelt correctly.  If you want students to mark for specific content get them using a mark scheme to allow them to see what the correct answers are.  Using peer marking takes some time to get right as your students will need some training, however, it’s a useful tool to have I your arsenal.

Marking for SPAG:  I don’t or ever would claim to be an expert of SPAG or marking for it.  SPAG however, is an important thing for students to focus on as it will help them make greater progress in some subjects.  When marking for SPAG each school has their own policy.  When I’m marking for SPAG I wright it next to it so that students are aware of what sorts of things they need to be looking for within my marking.

The last thing to consider when marking is the grade you are giving work and how this can be used within your data analysis which I will discuss in more detail at a later date.  I hope that this gives you a few marking ideas.

Thanks for reading

Chalky