Effective marking strategies for learners: What helps, what hinders?

The abandonment of national curriculum levels has created an assessment upheaval in our schools. Alongside the difficult process of developing new internal systems, there has been a renewed focus on formative assessment and assessment for learning (AfL) (Black and Wiliam, 1998a, 1998b). However, in response to a continuing emphasis on external accountability and a desire to demonstrate tangible evidence of good practice, many schools have also introduced complex forms of marking to support their formative assessment. ‘Tickled pink’ and ‘green for grow’ comments are used to guide students’ learning, and the ‘purple pen of power’ has become the weapon of choice for enabling students to make improvements in their work. However, reports from both the Education Endowment Fund (Elliott et al., 2016) and the Independent Teacher Workload Review Group (2016) are critical of marking processes that rely on teachers spending huge amounts of time writing lengthy comments in differe