Recently, an American educator told me that she heard from a friend who taught here in a premier junior college that Singaporean teachers don't care to give feedback when they mark. They are only concerned with grammatical mistakes, he said.
I don't know if that's true of the whole system, but in the primary schools and to a large extent the secondary schools, marks are what count for teachers, students and parents. This is sad because a mark does not tell us enough what is good or not so good about a piece of writing. And if teachers say it's easier to give a mark than comments, I would beg to differ. Have we not, at one time or another, been caught in this great dilemma of how many marks to give? 5, 5.5 or 6? And what is the difference between these marks?
It is really time to give more attention to giving quality feedback instead of marks. Watch this video about narrative feedback, which is more than just giving comments, and see if there's a way we can adopt this idea for our marking.
I don't know if that's true of the whole system, but in the primary schools and to a large extent the secondary schools, marks are what count for teachers, students and parents. This is sad because a mark does not tell us enough what is good or not so good about a piece of writing. And if teachers say it's easier to give a mark than comments, I would beg to differ. Have we not, at one time or another, been caught in this great dilemma of how many marks to give? 5, 5.5 or 6? And what is the difference between these marks?
It is really time to give more attention to giving quality feedback instead of marks. Watch this video about narrative feedback, which is more than just giving comments, and see if there's a way we can adopt this idea for our marking.
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