What happens to a test after it is marked

Over the next few weeks, South African schools will run the last papers of the year. Teachers will mark most of those scripts and record the totals; by January the scripts will sit in a storeroom with the information still inside them.

A mark tells a teacher how many questions a learner got right. The wrong answers tell her more: which misconception the learner holds, and whether a third of the class holds the same one. Reading a paper that way takes a method and some time, and teachers have little of either in the last weeks of the year.

We worked on this with teachers in August, at the third workshop in the Gold Fields Teacher Support Programme, delivered with JET Education Services. Thirty teachers from five schools took part. They teach Grades 4 to 9, which sits outside kolab.’s Foundation Phase home; the principle carries across both.

Before the session, 18 of them completed an anonymous check-in. Most said that after they mark a test, they take the class through the whole paper, question by question. It is a reasonable habit, and it gives each question the same share of the lesson. We worked through an alternative: an analysis sheet. Read down a column and you find the question the whole class missed; read across a row and you find the learner who needs something different from her classmates. The teacher then spends feedback time where the marks show a gap.

The teachers built the full cycle in miniature from a newspaper shopping insert. They set questions, wrote a memo, wrote each other’s tests as learners with one realistic error planted on purpose, then marked, moderated and analysed the results in pairs. On the feedback form, one Grade 5 teacher named the most valuable thing to take back: “Not just marking wrong but getting to know what made the answer incorrect.”

Twenty-one of the 30 completed that form, and 19 of the 21 said they would moderate papers before learners write them. I should be clear about what that figure is. The teachers made that commitment in the room, minutes after a workshop, and stated intent is the weakest evidence we collect. I do not yet know how many of the 19 moderated a paper before their Term 4 exams.

Assessment matters to a funder for a reason unrelated to exams. A school already produces this evidence each term, across its subjects, at no extra cost. A teacher who can read her own marked scripts sees where her teaching landed and where it missed, without waiting for an outside evaluation to tell her. Supporting that skill puts the school’s own data to work.

The papers going out this month will come back carrying a term’s worth of information. A teacher with an analysis sheet and a colleague to moderate with will read it. A teacher marking alone, at speed, at the end of a long year, will record the totals and move on, and I would not blame her.