Less marking, better outcomes

Teachers spend more time marking than almost anything else outside the classroom. It is one of the most consistent findings in Australian workforce surveys and one of the most common sources of exhaustion at the end of a term.

What makes this harder is that much of that time may not be producing the improvement it is meant to.

The problem is not understanding. It is time, structure, and what schools actually ask teachers to account for.

Marking is visible, trackable, and required. Feedback is often oral, in the moment, and harder to systematise. So marking expands to fill the available hours while feedback gets squeezed into the margins, even when the research is unambiguous about which one changes outcomes.

What the system rewards

Schools need records. Parents expect grades. Reporting cycles create deadlines. All of this makes marking the default response to student work, not because teachers believe it is more effective, but because it is the response the system is built around.

The result is a familiar pattern. A class set of assessments comes in, detailed written comments go out, and most students read the grade and move on. The hours spent writing those comments rarely change what happens next.

Kluger and DeNisi (1996) reviewed over two hundred feedback studies and found that in more than a third of cases feedback actually decreased performance. The common factor was feedback that directed attention away from the task and toward the student’s own sense of ability. Grades do exactly this. They answer the question students are most anxious about, which makes everything written alongside them easier to ignore.

What effective feedback actually does

Hattie and Timperley (2007) found that feedback has the most impact when it targets process and self-regulation rather than the task itself. Feedback at the task level, whether an answer is correct, has modest impact. Feedback that addresses how a student approached a problem and what they might do differently has significantly more. Feedback that builds a student’s ability to monitor and adjust their own thinking has the most durable effect of all.

Most written marking sits at the task level. The comments that take the longest to write often have the least impact.

Verbal feedback during a task, while students are still working, is often more effective than written feedback after it is complete. A targeted comment in the moment can redirect thinking before a misunderstanding becomes entrenched. Whole-class feedback based on patterns in student work is another high-leverage approach. Rather than writing individualised comments on thirty papers, identifying the three most common errors and addressing them in the next lesson means every student benefits and the response is faster.

When written feedback is given, it works best when it is tied to the next opportunity. A comment that students cannot act on is a comment that will not change anything.

What to look for when reviewing feedback practices

When reviewing how a team responds to student work, it is worth asking:

• Are students reading the comments, or only the grade?
• Is feedback arriving while students can still use it?
• How much time is spent on summative marking compared to formative feedback during learning?
• Does feedback tell students what to do next, or only how they performed?

Adjusting feedback practices does not always require starting from scratch. Shifting one summative marking task toward a whole-class response, or building in a short verbal feedback loop during a unit, can change both the impact on students and the time cost for teachers.

Spending time where it changes things

There is no simple answer to how much marking is enough. Schools have reporting requirements that are not going away and parents reasonably expect to know how their children are progressing.

But if marking is consuming most of the time teachers have for responding to student work, something is worth reconsidering. Time spent on detailed written comments on a finished task is time not spent on the kind of feedback that actually shifts learning.

The question is not how thoroughly you marked it. It is whether students learned something from your response.

Planuva is designed to help teachers make better use of the time they have. When programs are clear and assessment is well designed, the feedback that matters most can happen during learning rather than after it.

If you would like to spend less time marking and more time improving outcomes, register your interest at https://planuva.com