Marking and Feedback Policy and Guidelines

Sacred Heart School

Marking and FeedbackPolicy

Marking and Feedback Policy and Guidelines

This policy forms part of a whole-school policy for teaching and learning. It relates to the ethos of the school and has direct links with curriculum planning and assessment.

How children’s work is received and marked and the nature of feedback given to them will have a direct bearing on learning attitudes and future achievements.

The policy must be:

Clear in its purpose
Manageable
Productive in its outcomes
Informed by pupils’ individual learning needs and previous assessments.
Consistently applied by all staff

1.PURPOSES: Reasons for marking

To recognise, encourage and reward children’s effort and achievement and celebrate success
To provide a dialogue between teacher and children and clear appropriate feedback about strengths and weaknesses in their work
To improve children’s confidence in reviewing their own work and setting future targets, by indicating the ‘next steps’ in learning
To indicate how a piece of work could be corrected or improved against assessment criteria
To help pupils develop an awareness of the standards they need to reach in order to achieve particular levels of the National Curriculum
To identify pupils who need additional support/more challenging work and to identify the nature of the support/challenges needed
To provide evidence of assessments made and help moderate the interpretation of learning intentions and levels achieved
To involve parents more in reviewing their child’s progress and to help in reporting to parents
To aid curriculum planning.

Marking should be positive, clear and appropriate in its purpose – it needs to offer positive benefits to staff and children and the outcomes need to be fed back into planning.

Principles

If children are to develop as independent learners, with an awareness of their own strengths as well as areas for development (learning targets) it is essential that:

They are made aware of the learning intentions of tasks/lessons and of the criteria against which their work will be marked/assessed. ‘This is what you are going to do and this is how I will be marking it.’
The learning needs of individual children are understood and work is matched and marked appropriately
Their work is marked in such a way that achievement is acknowledged and teaching points are highlighted
Where appropriate marking/feedback is linked directly to learning targets

Wherever possible marking takes place with the children, eg when staff are working with a focus group. It offers guidance as to the extent to which learning intentions have been met and suggests the next steps children might take in their learning.

Towards a whole-school approach

In order to achieve a whole-school approach marking methods must be agreed and should be:

Consistent across year groups
Developmental across the age-range
Consistently applied by all those working with children in school, including supply teachers and support staff
All work by pupils completed in class or at home should, at the very least, be acknowledged with the adults’ initials to show it has been received and seen.

The nature of feedback

Comments should refer to the learning intention of the task
Comments may form the basis of a discussion between teacher and child, eg reviewing targets set
Comments may be oral or written, formal or informal
Comments may be given on a group or individual basis

Note: Research has shown that immediate feedback is the most effective and is therefore more likely to be ORAL than WRITTEN.

Oral feedback

is most powerful and has maximum impact when pointing out successes and improvement needs against the learning intentions. Written reflections can pull down the quality of articulation of the learning. The quality of the thinking can be higher if it is oral.
is usually interactive and developmental. It may give reassurance or a quick check in progress. The effect of teacher comments will be seen in a child’s response in moving on to the next learning step.
may be in the form of a learning/reading conference or review.

Written feedback

should be legible and clear in meaning
should be developmental, ie children will find out how they are getting on and what the next learning step will be

(It’s a wasted effort if children aren’t informed by it and can’t progress as a result of it.)

Note: Where written feedback is used, children are expected to read comments made on their work and it is essential that time should be made available for this.

Marking at a distance
Can children read your comments?
Can they understand your comments?
Do you allow time for them to read your marking?
Do you allow time for some improvement on the work to be made before moving on to the next activity or do you expect the child to be able to transfer your improvement suggestions to another piece of work in a new context?

MARKING METHODS / CLASSROOM PRACTICE

Teachers at SacredHeartPrimary School know that immediate feedback is the most effective and is therefore most likely to be oral.
CURRENT EDUCATIONAL RESEARCH SHOWS THIS TO BE SO.

Each Autumn term year group partners should agree common marking practices and plan for the range of feedback indicated on the following pages.

 A poster should be produced and displayed in the classroom.

Red pens should not be used to mark children’s work.

Type of Feedback / Rationale
Individual oral feedback about the child’s work – can be indicated by a written symbol, ‘VF’ which should be initialled by the child. / Most often used with young children where only small amounts of work are generated at a time.
Whole-class oral feedback / Usually happens at the end of lessons, going through work set, talking about processes and answers, discussing and reviewing learning and any misconceptions.
Group oral feedback / When working with a group, feedback is part of a dynamic process either at the end of or during the lesson
Acknowledgement marking – ticking or putting initials on work / Little impact on children’s progress, simply informs others that work has been dealt with, orally, in a group or in a whole-class setting. . If teacher checked, comments such as ‘Some are incorrect; can you find them?’ should be used.
Closed exercises (exercises or sums requiring ticks or dots) marked by the child while the teacher goes through each questions / It is a waste of teacher time to mark these away from children as they have no way of knowing later why or how they made mistakes. It is more productive to give children fewer of these during the lesson, thus allowing time to go through them together while children mark and self-correct their work, thus enhancing the learning
Quality marking by teacher / Highlighting success and improvement needs against the learning intention and then asking for some small improvement is rich in its impact on children’s writing and their attitude to improvement and learning. Concepts, skills and knowledge seem to be, on the whole, a better focus for quality written feedback, where the skill can be improved and developed, than application of learning intentions, which act more as a test of all the skills learnt so far.
A powerful model for marking is whole class or group marking of one piece, with the teacher leading but inviting children’s contributions so that the piece is marked through a process of discussion, analysis and modelling.
Quality marking should be applied to:
Literacy - One piece of written work per week. This should include highlighting to LI. The comment should be positive and specific and should also include a moving on comment. All other pieces of work should be marked to the LI.
R.E. - One piece of written work every two weeks. This should include highlighting to LI. The comment should be specific and should also include a moving on comment linked to AT. All other pieces of work should be marked to the LI.
Maths – A tick demonstrates a correct answer and incorrect answers should be shown by a dot. Self assessment (SA) and peer marking (PM) should be shown at the end of any children’s work where this applies. These types of work should be reviewed by the teacher. There should be one ‘quality’ mark per week with a challenge. All other pieces of work should be marked to the LI. Teacher should mark in green pen. Where SA/PM has taken place pupils should use red pen.
VF (verbal feedback) needs to be noted when given and initialled by the pupil. T-teacher marked. TA-teaching assistant marked.(Children in T/TA group are supported and give immediate feedback. Children’s work marked immediately while fresh in head. Note any observations – write directly into book or on stickers then stick into book).
Topic – All pieces of work should be marked to the LI and there should be some evidence of quality marking in all topic books.
In Year 1 this marking should be introduced in the Spring term or when appropriate for the child. By the end of the summer term all children should be familiar with quality marking.
NB Children must be given response time to improve their work.
‘Traffic Light’ Feedback
Individual Conferencing / Where an adult assesses a group of children need to respond to the same target, they may mark their work with a ‘traffic light’ dot which corresponds to a question or challenge displayed on the classroom board.
During the course of the year every child should have at least one individual conferencing session with an adult. The child’s comments should be listened to and new targets established.
Quality marking by children (either alone or in pairs, as response partners). / Children can gradually be trained to identify their own successes and improvement needs, with control gradually handed over from teacher to child. This then means that more pieces can be marked in this way. The feedback is many dimensional: child self-evaluation, response partner contribution and some teacher feedback. This can empower children to realise their own learning needs and to have control over future targets.
‘Test’ marking for application learning intentions, where the work is an application of all skills learnt so far, providing a brief synopsis of the child’s needs so far for each of the criteria: eg

Spelling (sp): you still need to watch some of your word endings, such as –ly and –ion
Punctuation(p): you need to remember to use capital letters
grammar: (g)you sometimes lapse into the wrong tense – read through
handwriting: keep ascenders and descenders upright and parallel

etc
plus a brief comment about the overall quality of the work. / Traditional quality marking is to take an application learning intention (eg a story or a whole experiment) and mark everything – spelling, all grammar, etc. It is more constructive to ask children to take account of all the criteria and then provide a synopsis. Thorough marking of spelling etc, is more appropriate when the learning intention is about spelling.
This marking may be used for levelling work samples.
Spelling corrections should always be appropriate for individual children e.g. not every spelling corrected for every child in every piece of work.
Combinations of the above (eg pointing out successes only; taking an application piece and finding on improvement point to be improved on that piece of work). / Teachers need to decide on a balance between the needs of the learning intention and what is manageable. Experimenting with different ways of marking is encouraged.
Marking every error (copy editing) / Only appropriate when the piece is to be displayed and a fair copy is needed. Children learn very little through this process, as it is carried out mechanically.
Marking against the child’s target / This is appropriate if the target was for a group and has become, in effect, the learning intention of the work. Individual targets work best in Years 4, 5 and 6, where children track their own progress. Because of this, the teacher need only comment from time to time.

KEY FEATURES OF CELEBRATING ACHIEVEMENT

Self-esteem is the most significant factor in being a successful learner
All achievements are linked, as each builds further confidence in future goals
Links between achievements should be made explicit to children
Children should see learning as a continuum which, given time, anyone can master
Achievements should be treated in exactly the same way
External rewards encourage children to focus on the reward rather than the achievement
Research shows that rewards can reinforce lack of success for the less able
Develop an ethos of being able to readily identify achievements and proud moments
High teacher expectations can only be fulfilled with parallel measures to develop self-esteem

2.Monitoring and Evaluation

The policy will be monitored by the leadership group through:

regular discussions with teachers and children
lesson observations
scrutiny of children’s work

Date Agreed -March 2016

Date to be reviewed -March 2017

Learning together in God’s Love