Time Saving Tips For Marking

It's the bane of every teacher's life: you set student assignments because you want students to demonstrate their understanding of the learning you've covered in lessons, but when the students hand in those assignments, as the teacher, you're now faced with the task of marking and correcting the students' work, which can add up to hours of work.

Here's a smart way to ensure that students get great feedback on their assignments, without you having to spend hours and hours ploughing through every line and page.

This timesaving tip for marking student assignments involves using colour coding to mark each assignment.

The idea is to associate a different colour with a specific aspect of the learning involved in the assignment. For example, if you have set a literacy assignment such as a story or a report, you could identify factors such as:

• spelling
• punctuation
• opinions
• use of connectives
• use of speech marks

Each of the above factors is then associated with a colour, so for example, spelling could be associated with green, punctuation with red and so on. When you want to highlight some problem with spelling in an assignment, you can underline the phrases in green, and you can underline examples of errors in punctuation in red. You repeat the process for all the other factors you want to correct.

It's important you let the students know what each colour refers to.

When you give back the 'corrected' assignments, students have to go through the assignment taking note of the colours. This is a really powerful step because it forces students to think about the mistakes they have made and decide how to put those mistakes right. The colour tells them there is an error, and the type of error it is, but it's up to them to find out what exactly the mistake is and how to put it right.

Not only does this technique reduce the amount of time the teacher needs to spend on marking each assignment, it actually promotes effective learning because it encourages students to take more responsibility for their own learning.Very often when students get their assignment back they start asking incisive questions to the teacher about how to correct the errors and if this is skilfully handled it can ensure a much deeper level of understanding than if the teacher were simply to write corrections on the student paper.

This technique can be adapted to any subject area.


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