Could teachers’ written feedback be used more effectively to help children to develop their ideas for writing?
Written by: Rachael Falkner
6 min read
Rachael Falkner, Senior Lecturer in SEN, Oxford Brookes University, UK
Feedback has been shown to be effective in supporting children’s learning generally (Hattie and Timperley, 2007) and writing development more specifically (Graham et al., 2015). A recent evidence review for the Education Endowment Foundation (Newman et al., 2021) confirms that feedback has a positive impact, particularly for literacy, but suggests that more research is needed to evaluate feedback for different children in different situations. Many schools currently use Clarke’s ‘success and improvement’ model of written feedback (Clarke, 2003) in which comments on what has been done well are provided in one colour and steps for improvement in another, with children often required to edit work in response to comments in a third colour. However, reviews of marking and teacher workload have questioned whether the effectiveness of this approach justifies the investment of teacher time (Elliott et al., 2016; IT
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