But my students like written comments...
Feedback that is accurate, helpful, and doesn't ruin your Sunday evening
In my previous post, I wrote about how traditional written comments are not that effective. If a student gets a comment in their exercise book that says “you need to be more systematic” or “you need to infer more insightfully”, how is that going to help them improve?
Written comments like this might be true, but they aren’t useful. They are like a thermometer, in that they tell you a student’s weaknesses. But they are not like a thermostat, as they don’t help a student to change those weaknesses.
One argument is that we just need more specific and more detailed written comments. I disagree. I think that prose is just not the most effective medium if you want to help a student improve. Suppose you are learning to drive, and during a lesson, your instructor says very little. At the end, he hands you a lengthy and specific written comment.
Well done, your skills at parallel parking are improving and you showed good independent awareness of the steps required to effectively parallel park. You identified a safe and legal place to carry out the parallel park which was not too close to a junction or on a double yellow line. You were mostly in control of the manoeuvre but to improve you could make sure that you slow down and remember to check your mirrors. Well done, you are making good progress.
This is all true, but it is not very helpful. And, crucially, even if you doubled it in length or added even more detail, it would still not be that helpful. What you need - and what the majority of instructors would actually do - is to have another go at parallel parking with the focus on slowing down and checking your mirrors.
Whole-class feedback
School students need this too - the chance to practise and to do something that will help them improve. That’s why I am a fan of the approach called “whole-class feedback”. Instead of writing comments at the bottom of the work, a teacher reads all the responses from their students, makes notes on the common errors, and plans a lesson - or even a sequence of lessons - addressing these errors.
This lesson can provide some specific activities which are designed to change a student’s mental model and ensure that they do not make the same mistakes again.
We’ve written extensively about this approach, as have a number of teachers.
But my students like written comments…
One criticism of whole-class feedback, and a reason why it is perhaps not adopted more widely, is that a lot of people are quite attached to the traditional process of written comments. Students and parents like seeing the teachers’ writing in books and feel it’s a sign of personal attention - even though a teacher may end up writing the exact same thing in dozens of books. Senior managers in schools treat written comments as a proxy for teacher commitment and quality. I’ve heard some people say, well the whole-class feedback approach is great, but why can’t we do whole-class feedback and written comments?
The reason, of course, is that written comments are incredibly time-consuming. But this is where AI might be able to help. I don’t think written comments are worth the time teachers spend on them at the moment, but I don’t think they are actively harmful either. If we could find a way of producing them more efficiently, then we could free up teachers to focus on what actually makes a difference - analysing the students’ weaknesses, deciding on the best next steps, and designing the best next steps. Even better, perhaps we could use the AI to support those processes too.
That is what we have been working on at No More Marking over the last few months.
AI-assisted written comments and whole-class feedback
Here is how our AI-assisted feedback system works.
Teachers take part in a Comparative Judgement assessment session, making judgements about dozens of pieces of writing.
When they are judging the writing, they can record short verbal comments about each piece.
The AI transcribes all of the verbal comments from all of the teachers.
The AI turns these comments into a) individual written feedback for each student b) a whole class feedback report for the class teacher c) a whole year group feedback report d) a national feedback report.
Here is what the feedback looks like.
In our initial trials, this system sped up the production of both student feedback and whole-class feedback. I think the latter will be more valuable - but if you disagree, you can find out more about how our system works and see which you prefer.
Almost regardless of the merit of this case, fabricating written feedback from verbal comments is a huge addition. I've been trying to sell my English and Humanities departments on comparative marking, and this is just a huge sticking point.
Depending on the ages of the students maybe the teachers should ask them what it is they like about written comments. Do the students like negatively critical comments or is it only the positive ones that are appreciated I wonder. I'd also be interested in whether writing comments on students work is mainly electronic i.e. the student has emailed the work in and the teacher is responding on screen. In theory this should be less demanding and time consuming as a teacher could have a stored bank of comment to cut and paste and modify. Though we're back to how is this helping the students. I'd be genuinely interested to know what the students found helpful about teachers' written comments.