The Importance of Feedback After Summative Assessment

Tom Chaplin explains the rationale behind his exam feedback sheet and ways to use it effectively.

More so now than ever, with the rigour of the new 9-1 GCSE specifications, I feel it is particularly important for students to reflect on their summative assessments holistically rather than just receiving a grade and moving on.

A summative assessment can provide much more useful information than just a score or a grade.

Inspired by a similar document a fellow professional had shared on Twitter, the exam analysis feedback document allows students time to reflect strategically on what they have achieved and provides them with the next steps to improvement.

How does it work?

The document begins with students filling in their mark and then converting this into a percentage. In the future when the grade boundaries become more concrete students will also be able to fill this in too.

What went well?

The students should look back through their paper and highlight the topics that have gone well for them; quite simply they can see what mark they received in relation to the possible marks available for the question. If students have scored well on certain topics this will allow then to prioritise other topics to revise in greater depth for future assessments, whilst skimming over their areas of strength when revising.

Even better if?

Once they have established what has gone well, students must now decipher why they lost marks. For some it will be as being as honest as admitting to a lack of revision. Students can work out how many marks they have lost through silly mistakes, not knowing the answer, not understanding the question and running out of time. Students should fill in the amount of marks they lost in whichever box they feel is most applicable.

Moving forward

In the next stage the students are reflecting on the things they know but need to make stick! This is important as students may have the initial concepts but they need to work to embed these topics so in future assessments marks are not lost.

Things I don’t know! Even your best student will have something they don’t know or feel particularly confident with; it is important students are honest here and use the previous stages of the sheet to complete this box.

How did you revise? This box is just as important for the students as the staff. What methods have the students used? Is there potentially too much of one method used? This may be an issue if the student’s score is low, but if the student’s score is high, does it matter if they have only used one method? I would suggest not.

Whatever the score, staff can remind students of the variety of revision tools at their disposal; using a varied approach could help students finding revision monotonous.

Students should then set themselves two SMART targets. SMART stands for Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic and Time Bound. Setting such targets give the students a clear goal and a method of achieving it.

Finally students must take accountability of the steps they are going to take to ensure their SMART target is reached.

This sheet should not now be filed never to be seen again, students and staff should constantly refer to it and draw comparisons between each summative assessment thus refining and informing their revision.

Editable sheet attached below.