Thinking about feedback and marking papers… How should we mark our learners’ work? Do we offer the opportunity to learn through mistakes and corrections?

And, I wonder if we are unintentionally incorrectly using ratios and proportional reasoning when we then put a score on the paper.

Consider the following student’s work from a recent assessment.

Do you see the error?  Is it a big error? Does this young learner understand the task and how to solve it? What feedback should this learner receive?

This child was told that there was a multiplication error in the work. Do you agree?  Is it a matter of close reading on the teacher’s part? What feedback do we hope for to accompany the arrows shown below?

What if we exercise the art of questioning in our feedback? Compare What if you think about what happened here? to You have a multiplication error here. Which feedback will cause more action?

The score for this question was marked as 3.5/4.  Losing 1/2 point for this error seems reasonable.  Would losing 12.5 points also seem reasonable?

If we scale this out of 100 rather than 4,  that 1/2 point become 12.5 points.  Is that what we intend to do, and is it the message that we want to send?

Now, as it happened, this was a 4 question assessment.  This young learner’s questions were marked 4/4, 4/4, 3/4, and 3.5/4.  In question 4, there was the addition error described above. In question 3, the learner multiplied in the first step when division should have been used.  All of these points seem reasonable as long as the items each garner 4 points.  However, proportionally scaled up to 100 points, the 1-point error is now a 25 point error.

How might we rethink grading and scaling? What does research tell us about translating scores between scales?

If learning is our focus and results guide our decisions, what steps do we take now?

And, how are these results guiding the decisions of our young learners?