Feedback not marking: A case for Vibbl

Feedback is one of the most effective strategies for improving student outcomes (Higgins et al., 2016; EEF, 2022).

If we accept this claim then getting feedback right should be one of the highest priorities for school leaders, shouldn’t it? The issue is that getting it right for your school is not straightforward.

Written marking, one of the key prevailing modes of feedback in schools all over the world, has been proven to be inefficient, and in some cases pointless (Elliott et al., 2016; ITWRG, 2016; Kime 2018). So, why do we still do it?

Some of this behaviour is habitual, we have been marking for so long it feels like we have to do it (Kime, 2018). Some of this behaviour is guilt driven, we may be told not to mark books, but do it anyway because we feel like our students are missing out (they’re probably not) and we feel guilty if we don’t (Kime, 2018). Some of this behaviour is embedded, due to school leadership directives, we may be told to mark books, so we do (ITWRG, 2016).

We may justify excessive written marking by overestimating the impact of our marking on past attainment, although educational research suggests otherwise, and even paints a damning picture of the price of teacher workload linked to the noble, yet misguided pursuit of excessive written marking (Walker, Worth and Van den Brande, 2019).

The good news is that the tides are shifting and schools are moving increasingly to verbal feedback policies, which a recent UCL project has shown to be more engaging for students (Quinn, 2019), but this can present its own challenges:

Firstly, consider the myth of the multi-tasker, which has been debunked (Kirschner & De Bruyckere, 2017). Our lessons are packed full of curriculum content, relationship building, behaviour management procedures, do you always have time for good personalised or even good whole-class feedback? Can you consistently give good verbal feedback, whilst task-switching in the middle of a lesson, and can you reach all of the students you want to?

Secondly, Hattie and Timperley (2007) assert that, “Feedback has no effect in a vacuum; to be powerful in its effect, there must be a learning context to which feedback is addressed.” Therefore, through whole-class feedback, is it always possible to provide the specific contextualisation needed for all of your students to flourish?

Finally, there are also challenges for a senior leader, how do you know if your teachers are giving verbal feedback consistently and more importantly, how do you know if they are giving ‘good’ verbal feedback? Where is the evidence?

Hattie and Timperley (2007) state that, “Effective feedback must answer three major questions asked by a teacher and/or by a student: Where am I going? (What are the goals?), How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?), and Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?)” Yet, it takes two to tango. Even if you deliver textbook feedback to a student, your student has to interpret that feedback correctly and act on it for it to have any use at all. If they don’t it’s pointless and if they interpret the feedback incorrectly it can even harm their progress (Kluger and DeNisi, 1996). Consequently, how can we ensure that feedback is not only delivered correctly, but understood, and most importantly acted on?

We believe that Vibbl offers a middle pathway between written marking and giving verbal feedback in-person that takes benefits from both strategies whilst mitigating key weaknesses from these other strategies.

We have designed Vibbl to be within the locus of control of the teacher, in the same way that written marking is. It still takes time, but arguably a lot less, as speaking is significantly faster than both handwriting and typing. You have evidence of feedback in the same way as you do with written marking, and as the feedback is verbal, you lose the challenges associated with handwriting and potentially negative student perceptions with written marking (Yeager et al., 2014), whilst gaining the positive features of verbal feedback (Quinn, 2019).

Where we think Vibbl can support learning is through enabling high-quality targeted feedback, that is meaningful and motivational – free from the need to task-switch – providing the extra benefit of adding clear contextualisation to feedback. Even further contextualisation through assessment frameworks or model answers could also be added both quickly and easily. We cautiously suspect this may help your students to better understand and act on key insights from your feedback.

The research on feedback is complex and sometimes contradictory (Shute, 2008), so much of what we think about Vibbl is speculative at this stage, but the whole process has been designed around 3 key principles we have derived from the body of research on feedback that we are aiming to deliver:

1. Making feedback faster and easier is probably a good thing as teachers will have more energy and time to improve learning. This may also help talent retention as marking currently creates significant workload for teachers.
2. Making feedback better through tools to improve trust and understanding (Student Perceptions) between teachers and students, and through improving contextualisation in verbal feedback through pairing feedback with images.
3. Making feedback more collaborative through our coaching tools in Vibbl Premium and the ability to create a learning conversation through feedback on feedback.

As you can see, these principles guide our core mission, but ultimately Vibbl is just a tool. The true impact of feedback, in all its beauty and complexity, will come down to you and your colleagues. How you use Vibbl in your specific context, with your professional judgement and knowledge to drive student progress, will determine its success. We are honoured to be working with you.

You are the innovators who will help us to test our assumptions in real learning environments and help us to perfect and develop our theories, to hopefully help many schools and students to come.