How teacher feedback improved students' homework through the use of feedback

last updated:01 Jan 2009

Ruth Gowers, a secondary science teacher in Yorkshire, was concerned that only a small number of students were returning homework and that it was often of low quality. 

She researched whether giving her students formative feedback might be an effective strategy to improve homework quantity and quality.

Ruth learned more about the use of comments-only marking by reading a Research for Teachers (RfT) study focusing on raising standards through classroom assessment.

This reported that students’ scores on a range of thinking tasks improved significantly when they were only given comments, as compared to students who were given either marks and comments, or only marks. 

The research strategy
Ruth started by collecting data about the way in which her students made use of the feedback she gave them. She found that students liked getting both marks and comments but were not reading the comments given.

With support from a science colleague Ruth developed a strategy which included:

• planning homework that lent itself to formative assessment, for example asking students to answer an open question
• offering comments only in her marking
• sharing feedback on common mistakes with the whole class rather than writing them into individual books
• encouraging students to use the feedback to improve their work and giving them opportunities to do so within their lessons.

Ruth found that following the introduction of her new strategy significantly more students handed in their homework and that the homework was of a higher quality and was easier to mark.