Student feedback – How to mark smarter (without paid products)
Aaron Swan shows how you can use the apps already on your school-issued devices to make the task of giving student feedback less onerous…
- by Aaron Swan
- English teacher since 2007 and writer
One of the most arduous tasks of any essay-based subject is that of marking. Deep marking, mandatory formal assessments, individualised feedback, student responses. These all combine to create a workload that requires a significant time investment from teachers in order to connect with the students’ thought process.
Here, I want to explore how marking and feedback can be structured differently, so as to make the best use of the technology and software now available to us. This is without resorting to paid third-party products.
Time and space constraints
Like most teachers I know, I find marking and writing feedback to be an arduous task. It can pile up quickly and give rise to numerous problems.
The limited space available on pages and in margins for comments is an issue. The student’s cognition needs feedback, of course. But so does the quality of their expression, which is a separate developmental objective.
Cultural and humanities subjects regularly task students with writing essays that balance subjective and personal responses with objective and distanced ones. This means that our feedback must be sensitive and sympathetic to both.
A student’s spelling, punctuation, grammar and handwriting still warrants commentary – and then there’s the level of literacy preceding their response.
I’ve used digital markbooks for decades, but the final piece of the puzzle has been to engage a speech-to-text function that records my feedback alongside their grades. In so doing, issues of time and space constraints have changed in my favour.
My transcribed dialogue lets me talk students through their work in detail, whilst lending much more depth to my praise and commentary on their successes and demonstrations of metalearning (such as their planning, engagement and focus).
“The final piece of the puzzle has been to engage a speech-to-text function”
My feedback to each student is starting to resemble a letter that guides them through my experience of their work. This makes it more personal and relatable.
A nurture exercise
Striking the right tone has taken some time, of course. However, the process now feels much more like a nurture exercise, and less like ‘feature spotting’ for the success criteria.
I’m frequently using students’ names, dropping in lots of positive remarks and stating what I‘m enjoying. My marking is now more enthusiastic than ever, which is what I think makes it meaningful.
“My marking is now more enthusiastic than ever, which is what I think makes it meaningful”
Here’s how to try something similar for yourself…
Move from paper to digital
Storing raw marks in a digital database is commonplace. But keeping said database in a cloud storage location (such as a OneDrive folder) is less so.
By doing so, you can benefit from a few useful features – particularly the way in which an online location will make your data easily accessible to mobiles and tablets.
Remember that workbooks contain sheets
Spreadsheet applications, such as Excel, typically present users with a workbook that can contain numerous different sheets. These are selectable via tabs at the bottom of the screen.
When setting up their workbooks, teachers will often dedicate different sheets to different teaching groups. However, an alternative – a potentially better – approach could be assigning different sheets to different data classes.
For example, ‘Sheet 1’ could be used to enter the raw marks for each assessment. ‘Sheet 2’ could then ‘reference’ the raw marks and convert these to a percentage. ‘Sheet 3’ can then reference the percentage and convert this to a grade.
This quantitative data tends to be all that’s required by the school. However, we could also create a ‘Sheet 4’ for recording qualitative data.
Less ‘feedback’, more ‘dialogue’
With your database stored in the cloud and set up with sheets for quantitative and qualitative data, we can increase our marking efficiency yet further.
Grab your stack of assessments and your phone, call up the database and open your qualitative feedback sheet.
The intersection of your ‘Student’ rows and ‘Assessment’ column is where you can insert written feedback on students’ essays. However, instead of typing it out, tap the microphone icon on your mobile’s on-screen keyboard and dictate your comments.
This can speed up the process considerably. However, it will entail getting used to the idiosyncrasies of the speech-to-text facility you’re using (and potentially having to state when you want a full stop or comma to be inserted).
Batch print your feedback
The simplest way of distributing your feedback to students would be to just simply copy and paste the contents of your ‘qualitative feedback’ column into a series of separate Word documents. However, that’s not the fastest method.
Through the use of Word’s ‘mail merge’ function, you can instead turn a single template into a series of different feedback sheets that are unique to each student. You can then send the full batch out with a single click.
Mail merge operations can also reference the qualitative data for each individual; their raw marks and grades, as well as whole class results, such as averages or rankings. This is information the teacher simply can’t know when marking work by hand. Making a template effectively means ‘writing once’, before printing for all.
“Turn a single template into a series of different feedback sheets that are unique to each student”
Further advantages using AI
Now that your feedback is entirely digital, you can copy and paste the relevant column of comments into an AI service and instantly generate a whole-class summary. This can focus on the successes made by ‘all students’, ‘most students’ and ‘some students’.
Better yet, send the row of qualitative data pertaining to one student through AI to help generate a cumulative report on his or her progress, commenting on any recurrent successes or shortcomings.
This type of summary can be useful for parents, student reviews or SEN requests. Digital records can also be advantageous when planning lessons prior to assessing.
Send the qualitative feedback through AI, providing the direction to rephrase it as ‘step-by-step instructional guidance’.
If you then mail-merge this foregrounding and print it off, you now have a set of custom guidance notes for every student to read before undertaking an activity. It will show them how to avoid repeating prior errors.
What we want to achieve here is a move away from comments such as ‘You need to read for meaning sufficiently to ensure full understanding’ and towards clearer instruction, such as ‘Read two or three times using skimming, scanning and full reading before you start your response’.
Pulling everything together
The use of existing everyday technologies – primarily mobile devices – to assist in feedback can be a true game changer when it comes to productivity.
A number of third-party apps have already stepped in to provide such gains (albeit for a fee). However, it’s worth bearing in mind that you already have the tools needed to achieve similar results. At the same time, you’ll retain more control over the variables involved.
We just need to keep sharing how best to implement the many features of existing assets, like the productivity software and learning platforms already commonplace in schools.
The complexities involved in changing workflows, devising templates and setting up spreadsheets may well call for some form of ICT-related teacher CPD.
But this would be training that ultimately helps you and your colleagues make better use of assets and facilities you’re already paying for – in the service of improved productivity and less workload.
- Set up an Excel workbook with columns for ‘student names’, ‘class group’ and ‘assessment title’.
- Once you’ve added your feedback, save the workbook as a .csv file and exit Excel.
- In Word, open the ‘Mailings’ tab, click on the ‘Select Recipients’ button and then select the ‘Use an Existing List’ option. Select the workbook you created earlier (and the qualitative data sheet if prompted). Word is now connected to your workbook.
- To build your template, click the ‘Insert Merge Field’ button. We want to include at least the student names and the qualitative feedback as fields here, and create our feedback sheet around these fields.
- Refine which students you want to populate the fields by clicking on the ‘Edit Recipient List’ button, and using the blue text options shown under ‘Refine Recipient List’ to sort and filter by class or year group. Only those students with ticks shown beside their names will be included in mail merge output.
- When you’re ready, click the ‘Finish and Merge’ button and select ‘Print Documents’. Print or preview your sheets from the Mailings tab using ‘Finish and Merge’. The printer dialogue box will give you the option to print the output to a PDF file should you wish.
Aaron Swan is an English teacher, Language For Learning lead, and has been a head of department.
