By Lynsey Stearne, Teacher of Art and Design Technology, St John Plessington Catholic College, Bebington, Wirral
In May 2023 I was asked if I was interested in being an EFA lead for a new Embedding Formative Assessment programme (EFA), starting in September of the next school year. About to begin my eighteenth year as a teacher of art and design technology, it is fair to say it was time for a shake-up. I had become a little stuck in my ways and I was curious to see what EFA could do to boost my teaching toolkit and student performance. It was also clear from the outset that my school was fully engaged in the two-year programme and it wasn’t going to be another flash in the pan, so I signed up.
In my Level 2 hospitality and catering lessons, I had found that students would excel on the practical elements of the course, but when it came to written exams, performance wasn’t as high. Historically, when giving pupils past papers and mock exams, I would mark them and hand them back to pupils with a purple pen and we would spend a lesson or two writing out model answers over the questions in which they had not picked up full marks. I might even get a visualiser out and complete a paper with them, walking-talking mock style. In one of our EFA sessions, Dylan Wiliam was talking about how students can have a negative view on feedback because if they have lots of things wrong, they have lots to correct. Whereas a student with fewer things wrong doesn’t have to work as hard. This was a bit of a lightbulb moment for me. My usual purple pen feedback meant that pupils with lots to write were switching off halfway through and those with not much to write weren’t really getting anything out of the lesson. I knew my year 11 groups were going to be a focus for what I was going to do next.
For the next mock exam, I used a Question Level Analysis (QLA) spreadsheet to pinpoint what questions pupils had performed well on and poorly on as a class. The QLA identified 2 clear topics (the environmental health officer (EHO) and environmental factors) where only a couple of pupils had scored more than half marks; no-one had got full marks, so they became my focus for the feedback lesson. Before I returned pupils’ papers to them, I photocopied three examples of pupil answers to the EHO question; a high, medium and low response, and asked pupils if they could rank them. I purposely tried to find answers with a similar word count so they weren’t swayed by the lack of or abundance of writing. Pupils were then given a mark scheme and asked to mark the answers before they were given back their papers and redid their answers to the question. The change in engagement was clear. All pupils had something to add to their responses and they were quite competitive about who had marked accurately.
Cognitive overload is something that I am sure I am guilty of. With the ever-increasing content in specifications and the lack of time; the pressure to throw information at students and just expect them to remember is overwhelming. After reading cognitive psychologist Daniel T. Willingham’s book Why Don’t Students Like School? and his research on improving student’s memory, I tried the Method of Loci with my year 11 students. The method asks pupils to visualise a familiar journey or route and plot visual cues along the way. For the question on the environment, I used the journey from my food room down to the school canteen. I asked the pupils to visualise all of the taps running and the noise of the washing machine filling the room to ‘cue’ waste energy and water. When lining up on the yard for lunch, I asked them to visualise someone on the roof of the school fitting solar panels to cue the memory of renewable energy, and so on. I am pretty sure students thought I was a little crazy as my journey continued including annoying ‘reduce, reuse, recycle’ songs but they were all fully engaged and when asked to answer a similar question they all had improved results. In our final revision sessions before their exam, it was great to see how many of them could recall the cues from the lesson we had done a couple of months before.
Having just celebrated the end of the first year of the EFA programme it has been great to see the changes in engagement and progress in pupils but there is still lots of work to do next year, and I am waiting eagerly for GCSE results day to measure the success of year 11.
