Evaluating Written Work

Recently teachers have been confused by a relatively new term in assessment work. It is of course the Norwegian word “fremovermelding”. In English this called “feedforward”, also spelt “feed forward” and even FeedForward.

Teachers maintain, quite rightly, that they have been giving this kind of information for many years. If you tell a pupil that his grade is disappointing because he makes so many concord mistakes, it should be obvious that this also means: “If you want a better grade, you must look carefully at the concord mistakes and try to understand what was wrong.”

However, we also know that:

• We are required to give “feedforward” as well as feedback, and be able to document that we have given it.
• Many pupils do not spend much time reading our feedback unless we try to force them to do so.

One way to kill both these birds with one stone is to ask pupils to evaluate their text’s strong and weak sides, based on your feedback, and then ask them to choose a weakness that they are going to focus on improving.

Some teachers refuse to give their pupils a grade on their written work until they have:

• studied the feedback
• formulated their own “feedforward”
• suggested a grade based on the subject matrix

We should also remember to reinforce positive sides of a pupil’s text in order to:

• give praise where praise is due
• remind pupils that a lot of what they do is good
• help them develop and maximise their strong points

Link to Eksamensveiledninger.