A case study on saving time: Effective marking and feedback in Geography

George Davies-Craine, Dr Challoner's Grammar School, UK Marking and feedback is a contentious and debated issue in education. In many cases, it is a high-workload process with a low impact, often leading to students not understanding concepts better nor producing higher-quality work. The reasons for this are twofold: firstly, there is often a time gap between feedback and improvement, and secondly the least able are most in need of the feedback, which they are least likely to be able to interpret (Sherrington, 2017). Then there is the issue of time spent marking: sets of fully marked books are often seen as a traditional proxy for good teaching (Hendrick and Macpherson, 2017). The time spent acknowledging every piece of work through processes such as ‘tick and flick’ or by placing a generic comment on every piece of classwork can be better spent giving specific information to the student on how to improve their work. Therefore, in light of this, fewer pieces of work should be mark