Giving quality feedback to students is time consuming but, as the EEF points out, we know it’s effective in improving the quality of learning. Here at The Blue Coat School we’re always trying to improve how we feedback to students and in the last 18 months we’ve been sharing short videos of us talking through exam questions that students can watch in their own time.
Why use video to deliver exam feedback?
- Not every student needs to see you go through every question in class (if they’ve got that question correct, for example) and when you do go through a question those who need to see it often need time to take it in. Videos of each question mean students can just watch the questions they need, in their own time and view them multiple times if necessary.
- We want to try to develop students’ metacognitive strategies but this takes time: as the teacher (expert) how do we know how to tackle a question when we look at it? How do we monitor that we’re doing it correctly and how do we evaluate if we’ve got a sensible answer? Filming the feedback allows us time to talk through our thinking as well as simply showing how a question is done.
- If we film feedback then it’s archived and students can use it again and again for detailed feedback when they’re looking at past papers etc.
How to use video to deliver more effective feedback
Four different members of the department filmed themselves going through a question and we also attached a PDF of our worked solutions so that students could refer to them as they watched the video. We filmed ourselves after marking the papers and we agreed on common mistakes/misconceptions we wanted to mention. Knowing we were committing our feedback to film really made us consider what we wanted to say and ensured we didn’t miss anything.
Benefits of delivering exam feedback using video
- Staff found the feedback lesson to be more productive. They were able to really focus on key questions that the whole class needed to look at and refer students to the secure videos for the remainder.
- Students really valued seeing their own teachers going through questions rather than an anonymous YouTuber.
- Students watched each question several times and would pause the clip and rewind. Many commented that slowing the process down in this way was really helpful.
- Students liked the platform we used (IRIS Connect) which enabled us to house everything in one place; the exam paper, the worked solutions, the official mark scheme and the videos.
Why we use IRIS Connect
We use IRIS Connect because you can record videos safely and securely - they never stay on the recording device, instead they go straight up to a password protected platform. We set up student accounts, which is simple to do in bulk and spent 5 minutes in their lesson modelling how they can access the resources in the platform.
Initial trials began in the maths department with all staff contributing to the recordings. Recordings can be shared between departments, and peers can leave time stamped comments for future reflection and analysis.
As an administrator of IRIS Connect, I can see which students had logged on and over 98% of students were accessing the platform to view the videos.
Next steps
Overall, we’ve filmed 3 sets of exams (about 45 questions per exam, split over 3 papers) as part of this trial with a group of about 90 students. Since starting this, we’ve had over 6,500 views from the students which corresponds with the overwhelmingly positive feedback we’ve had from them.
Other departments are now looking to use this method too, having seen the success we’ve had and our maths students have been requesting it in their other subjects, also!
Guest blog by Chris Webb @bcoldham, @northerntsa
If you'd like to read more about how to improve teaching and learning, check out our guide to effective teacher reflection >
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