Should schools consider outsourcing homework abroad? Or using computer technology to mark work? Your thoughts

[JaneMumsnet]

Hello,

We're a little flummoxed by a request we've had to comment about an education expert's suggestion that schools should consider sending pupils' work abroad to be marked, to help free up teachers' time.

Rebecca Allen, director of Education Datalab and reader in economics at UCL's Institute of Education made the suggestion at a conference.

She said that outsourcing marking can be "incredibly reliable" and also
went on to say that in the United States, there are people who are looking at using computers to mark texts, using the same types of technology used for online language translation apps and programmes.

What do you think? As usual, we'd love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks, MNHQ

Or how about just cutting class sizes, so each teacher has a reasonable workload?

or how about cutting the loads of admin teachers have to do?

I am amazed at the suggestion that teachers give up front line activity (marking squarely puts the teacher in front of students' work, and the teacher is the best person to assess and respond to students' work), so that they can get on with admin work. Amazing.

Besides the inherent problem that teachers then won't be as in touch with students' abilities, either the assessment will have to change (bad idea to tailor assessment so that it can be marked more easily) or automarkers will have to be much much better.

boffinmum I am not questioning Hattie's research, but I do not understand how he is measuring outcome. If we gave students in a bilingual programme and students getting 40 mins/wk of MFL a test on their language skills, we all know that the bilingual kids will come out way ahead. It depends what he is measuring, and if this is a multi-country meta-study that measure must change? It seems clear he is not asking if bilingual programmes are better at teaching MFL, which is their primary purpose.

Maybe the admin could be outsourced?

no Bonsoir, its all data protection. can't even put the admin in the bin without cross shredding it. One year I wore out four industrial shredders.

Bonkers

Teachers need to read and mark student work to have an accurate idea of individual pupil progress, so that they can tailor their lessons and target interventions at areas of weakness. The purpose of students submitting work to be marked is to track ability and progress and not to simply tick boxes.

There are other options. Such as students marking each others work in class. This allows the students to understand their mistakes, save teachers time and discuss weaknesses and areas for improvement as a class. Teacher can then review individual progress separately.

I've spent 5 hours today marking. I agree all teachers need to look at the pupils work each day and see how they've got on and what their next steps are. However that isn't what has taken most of the time. Mostly it's following a marking scheme that requires far too much detail that does not benefit the child or the teacher. It seems more and more schools (I do supply so see a lot of schools) are going down the route of ridiculous marking codes.

Examples:
Highlight every correct answer in green.
Highlight every incorrect answer in pink, show how to solve including full working out in red pen.
Write a comment for each of the 4/5 success criteria on whether the child has met them.
Write 5 next steps problems to do the next day to do and re-mark the next day.
Highlight any targets the children have met and date in the front of their books.
Fill in a class chart saying if each child has met, partially met or not met the days learning objective.

It makes marking each book take far too long, produces a lot of pretty ink that is mainly ignored (apart from when the books are taken in for checking by senior management) and prevents me from having the time or energy to focus on other areas of teaching my class.

If I could just mark every question right or wrong and leave a brief general comment (either outsourcing the rest of the marking code or it not being required), it would massively cut down on my workload.

Boffin, please be wary of Hattie, don't just spout 'Hattie effect size of blah means it's worthless'. What exactly does Hattie tell us about homework? Well, not a lot, because it depends on the homework. Does Hattie tell us that all homework is worthless? Or just shit homework? Or just homework with classes that can't be bothered to do it. Can that really be distilled down into a single figure? I doubt it.

I'm a maths teacher. Sometimes I set homework that's really useful and tells me stuff about what the kids can and can't do. Sometimes I set homework that's inadvertently too hard. Sometimes I set homework that's inadvertently too easy. Sometimes I set homework just because I have to set homework according to the homework timetable. Some of my classes actually do the homework, some it's a waste of time even asking them to write it down. If Hattie came along and said he had calculated a single figure to assess the effectiveness of the homework I set across all my classes, I'd think he was an idiot.

I've spent 5 hours today marking. I agree all teachers need to look at the pupils work each day and see how they've got on and what their next steps are

Look at each pupil's work, yes, see how they are getting on, yes. Marking it? No. Creating detailed records of each day's work? No. You can look at each pupil's work and help them move on by just walking around the class and talking to the kids. In secondary you don't need to tell each kid individually what their next steps are, you can do that to the whole class.

The problem is that without the red pen in books, SLT would suspect that those conversations are not happening. It sounds like a lot of marking might just be to prove to other people that assessment and feedback are actually happening, not because written feedback is more valuable than immediate verbal feedback. That's just wasting time. Instead of outsourcing that, just stop doing it.

As for the OP, has the director of the think tank ever been a teacher? If not, then why do they feel qualified to spout off on this sort of thing? And if so, then why are they talking nonsense? Did they mark with their eyes closed? Did they learn nothing about the kids when marking their work? Did a personal knowledge of the kids not inform their marking? If they think that marking is so valueless to a teacher and a personal touch in marking so useless to a student that it can be shipped off to India, then I'm afraid I don't rate their opinions on education as worth listening to.

Certainly some aspects of marking don't require a teacher. I often read the answers out to homework in class, get the kids to do the ticks or crosses and write basic comments like 'use a ruler' or 'show your working', then I take it in and do the more important marking like figuring out why Jonny keeps getting the wrong answer, but I often get important feedback from the class and the class gets important feedback from me as we do the ticks and crosses. If that was sent abroad, valuable information would be lost.

The comment in the OP talks about 'how reliable' outsourced marking can be. Well reliability is all well and good, but marking is a two-way conversation between the teacher and student and if you introduce a third person who knows neither teacher nor student, then the conversation becomes less useful, regardless of the reliability of the marking.

afaik, Hattie is not measuring outcomes noblegiraffe . The 'measuring outcomes' bit was done by the many many original researchers of the huge body of work that Hattie has analysed. Each separate piece of work will have focussed on a particular technique and its effect on learning will have been measured. In an attempt to draw general conclusions, Hattie has used the effect size measure in an attempt to make the huge range of outcomes across all studies easily comparable.

Surely the time saved by not marking it myself would be offset by the time I spent writing a brief on what the marker is looking for, or anything which may be affecting a child's performance at that time, and the time spent going through the marked work afterwards for planning (and quality assurance) purposes.

It's a silly idea which sounds like it would work, but would just end up making things worse.

Not sure about the Hattie results - teacher training is 0.11, less important than diet but more important than subject knowledge.

Fair point nobel but as a professor you would expect that Hattie's work would have been properly scrutinised before being published (albeit in a book).

I have used some of Hattie's findings in a course I wrote recently, but mainly as a conversation starter - it certainly gets the conversation going amongst teachers and Headteachers as to what techniques (for want of a better word) are beneficial to learning.

You'd hope so pickled but it turns out I'm right:

ollieorange2.wordpress.com/2014/09/24/half-of-the-statistics-in-visible-learning-are-wrong-part-2/

So if half the statistics in the book have been calculated incorrectly, what faith should we place in the other half?

And that's before we even decide whether it is even valid to do a meta analysis of various educational research studies presumably measuring very different outcomes (and possibly poorly conducted, knowing how easy it is to set up and publish a study that is complete rubbish).

DD teacher gets TAs to do a lot of his marking. I am not sure that sending marking abroad would be much different. I would rather have work marked really well by an overseas person than marked lazily by a UK teacher.

I am not sure how much time outsourcing marking would save as the teacher would have to read through the pupils work to see where they were going wrong.

marked lazily by a UK teacher

it isn't laziness reallytired, it is just that no one has the time. I used to regularly do 18 hours a day or more, as a full time teacher. You get to the point where you just can't see how to fit eating or sleeping into your life. I resigned when I realised I had spent 48 hours sitting continuously at my desk one weekend, and still hadn't finished the paperwork. No, none of it was marking, it was all the ofsted crap that takes priority, but doesn't actually contribute to education at all.

Children need improvement marking to make maximum progress. Ie. They need to know what they have done well and what their next steps are in learning. A child writing an essay and then having a tick at the bottom with "well done" has wasted their time. The essay is a lot of work for the child to write and they deserve decent marking.

To be honest, if my child's school was sending homework off to be marked by random complete strangers who had no idea of my child's previous performance, classroom behaviour, how the class had reacted to that lesson etc...

I'd just tell him not to bother with the homework.

slightlyeggstained, how do you know they don't? Many schools do. Not abroad, just to supply teachers.

Charis - well, at the moment, because he hasn't started yet. But apparently I need to start applying at the end of this year

When you say many schools do, how does this work? And would they tell you, or is it a dirty little secret type of thing?

No, it isn't secret, but they probably wouldn't say so unless asked. It's not unusual for supply teachers to be engaged purely to mark, or to mark remotely.

Good grief, no. When I look at my DCs books on parent's evening they are marked with against the success criteria and they are given the next steps. How could those next steps be decided by a person who doesn't even know the child?

Personally, I think "success criteria" and " next steps" a meaningless waste of time which at best leave children totally dependant on constant spoon feeding for their entire education and and at worst leave them so frustrated and bored they switch off permanently.

Just add up all the time spent on "success criteria" and " next step targets" and imagine what could be achieved if all that time was actually spent on teaching and learning.

In my DCs grammar school any new or training teachers who try to impose this sort of waste of time get very short shrift indeed, from staff and students.