Teachers do a lot of marking of student work. But is it necessary?
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In this comprehensive review of the literature on feedback, corrective feedback (example shown below) without mechanisms for correcting that feedback were found, unsurprisingly, to have little impact on student learning in most cases.
An example of minimal feedback
Unfortunately, there is also good evidence (see the same literature review) that taking even more time to add comments to student work does not lead, by itself, to improved student learning. So what can teachers do differently?
"When you grade, you help one child at a time. When you plan, you help all kids. Spend your time accordingly." ~ @hpicciotto #NCTMregionals
— David Wees (@davidwees) October 28, 2016
Here’s a simple strategy. Take a pile of student work and review it, looking for evidence of student performance, and find examples of feedback that you can meaningfully target to groups of students, and then design activities for the whole class to do that result in different groups of students getting feedback on their ideas. In other words, integrate the time you would spend marking with the time you spend planning but in response to what students did in your class.
One question that comes up when I suggest this strategy to teachers is “But what will I put in my grade-book?” Here I suggest that a grade-book can contain evidence of completion of tasks on a regular basis and that for a smaller number of assignments, more detailed information could be provided. Stopping grading everything doesn’t mean you can’t grade anything; just be more selective. A more radical suggestion is to work at the school-wide level and eliminate everything that isn’t absolutely necessary to improve student learning.