ABSTRACT
John Hattie and Helen Timperley’s article “The Power of Feedback” and Hattie’s “Visible Learning for Teachers” suggest forcefully that feedback could be a useful tool for moving student learning on. Strictly, marking and feedback are two separate things. Unfortunately, many people refer to marking as feedback, and the pressures that go with marking then influence our view of feedback. By providing feedback only at the end of learning, students do not have an opportunity to act on it. One of the biggest problems with feedback is whole school policies. No matter how high quality our feedback is, it will have little effect unless students are engaged in the process. For simple efficiency we teachers usually give out generic feedback statements or comments to groups of learners. Feedback needs to help students see what they have done well, what misconceptions have cropped up and how they could make improvements to drive learning forward.
