By the end of this course, you will be able to:

1. Analyze research on "ego-involvement" versus "task-involvement" to explain how grades can diminish the effectiveness of feedback.

You will explore seminal research, such as the work of Ruth Butler, to understand the psychological mechanisms of feedback. Specifically, you will examine how the presence of a grade shifts a student's focus from "task-involvement" (how do I get better at this?) to "ego-involvement" (how do I compare to others?), often washing out the learning benefits of any accompanying comments.

2. Understand techniques that encourage students to identify and analyse their own errors instead of just correcting them.

You will move beyond "feedback as information" to "feedback as detective work." We will cover practical strategies—such as "Dot in the Margin" or "Match the Comments"—that require students to actively engage with the feedback to locate and fix their mistakes, ensuring the learning takes place in the student's head, not just on the paper.

3. Evaluate your marking practices to ensure that feedback encourages more cognitive effort from students than it took you to write.

You will audit your current feedback habits against Dylan Wiliam’s "Golden Rule": feedback must create more work for the recipient than the donor. You will learn to identify when you are over-scaffolding or doing the intellectual heavy lifting for your students, and how to adjust your approach so that students become the primary agents of their own improvement.

4. Understand and evaluate peer assessment, self-assessment, and whole-class feedback to enhance the sustainability and effectiveness of individual marking.

You will implement the "Four Quarters Marking" framework to create a balanced diet of assessment that prevents teacher burnout. By leveraging whole-class feedback (scanning for patterns) and activating students as instructional resources (peer and self-assessment), you will ensure that detailed individual marking is reserved for when it is most impactful, rather than being a nightly burden.