Education Endowment Foundation:Improving teacher and pupil feedback – EEF scales up Embedding Formative Assessment programme

Improving teacher and pupil feedback – EEF scales up Embedding Formative Assessment programme

Author
EEF
EEF
Press Release •1 minute •

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) will support the scale-up of a programme to improve teacher and pupil feedback. The project will be evaluated to understand the scaling process and quality of implementation as the Embedding Formative Assessment programme – one of the EEF’s 19 Promising Projects – moves to a larger scale.

125 schools and 80,000 pupils will take part in the project looking at the scale-up of Embedding Formative Assessment, a professional development programme that supports teachers to use regular, informal assessments to identify their individual students’ strengths and weaknesses. Developed and delivered by the Schools, Students and Teachers network (SSAT), and based on the work of Professor Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy, the project will run across two academic years

One example of the many formative assessment techniques shared in the programme is providing feedback using find and fix marking’. Instead of marking answers as correct or incorrect, students are told how many answers they got wrong. Then they’re given time in class to find and correct their mistakes either individually or in groups. This approach aims to increase students’ ownership of their work and allows the teacher to identify where support is needed and address it.

Evidence from the EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit suggests that high-quality feedback can be one of the most cost-effective ways of boosting pupil attainment. But while many schools already use formative assessment techniques – where teachers make decisions, minute-by-minute and day-by-day, about how best to improve their pupils’ learning – they can be challenging to implement.

The EEF previously funded a large-scale effectiveness trial of Embedding Formative Assessment. Pupils made the equivalent of +2 months’ additional progress in their Attainment 8 GCSE score; pupils in the lowest third for prior attainment made more progress than their classmates in the top third.

This project, which will be independently evaluated by the Behavioural Insights Team, is designed to find out how to best scale the programme to have the greatest impact on pupils, teachers and schools across the country