: More Than Just Right or Wrong: Getting Feedback Right in Maths Rethinking feedback in maths.
—
Blog
More Than Just Right or Wrong: Getting Feedback Right in Maths
Rethinking feedback in maths.
Share on:
by Exchange Research School at Don Valley Academy
on the
Drew Leatherday
Drew is Assistant Headteacher for Staff Development Standards at Newfield School in Sheffield. In her ten year teaching career, her roles have included Lead Practitioner, Curriculum Leader of Mathematics and Assistant Headteacher for Impact of Teaching.
Providing feedback has a high impact on learning outcomes, and I’ve always felt a little smug about how straightforward feedback seems in my subject compared to others. Yet last year, I started to question whether my approach was truly effective for my pupils.
The Education Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) Improving Mathematics in Key Stages 2 and 3 guidance report highlights in Recommendation 1 that feedback is an important element of teachers’ responses to assessment. However, it was Recommendation 5 that really made me think: how exactly can teachers effectively develop pupils’ independence and motivation, and can feedback play a meaningful role in supporting this?
Previous practice My previous approach to daily feedback was centred around live marking (pictures 1 and 2) and self-assessment. Following formative unit assessments, I would support my pupils in self-assessing their work by live modelling the methods under the visualiser, they would then improve their work where required (pictures 3 and 4). I would then check these assessments, plan whole class feedback, reteach weaker topics, and set follow-up tasks to demonstrate improvement.
While live marking allowed me to address misconceptions quickly, I wondered – was I doing too much by identifying my pupils’ specific errors? Was I missing opportunities for pupils to review their own work?
I realised I was solving the mystery for my pupils – circling clues, naming the culprit and closing the case before they’d even examined the evidence.
Setting the goal I began by defining the goal of my feedback: to help my pupils progress from novices to experts. To me, an expert pupil is someone who can:
1. Accurately review their own and others’ work (e.g. judge how many marks a question deserves out of 4) 2. Identify misconceptions in their work independently 3. Correct those misconceptions and improve their work
I wanted to strengthen my focus on Dylan Wiliam’s point that ‘the purpose of feedback is to improve the student and not the work’ and target developing my students’ ‘metacognition and motivation towards learning maths’. (EEF Improving Mathematics in Key Stages 2 and 3 guidance report recommendation 5 – Develop pupils’ independence and motivation)
Implementing change: Find and fix Wiliam suggested that ‘rather than thinking about feedback as information, think about feedback as detective work, [creating] a puzzle or a challenge for the students to engage in’. The Improving Mathematics in Key Stages 2 and 3 guidance report reiterates this, stating that teachers should ‘give feedback sparingly so that it is meaningful’.
Inspired by rereading Mathematics Inside the Black Box (Wiliam and Hodgen), I introduced three ‘find and fix’ strategies:
1. Circulation feedback: Verbal prompts that encouraged pupils to analyse their work, such as ‘Two out of ten answers here are incorrect; find and fix them’ and ‘There’s one error in this 4 – mark question that significantly impacts the answer; find and fix it’.
2. Improving quality of working: Prompts to push for higher-quality reasoning, for example, ‘Your solutions are correct but brief – work with Leo to produce model answers that would convince an examiner for full marks’ and ‘This would earn 1 out of 3 marks – improve your working to gain all 3’.
3. End-of-unit feedback: Instead of directly marking assessments, I reviewed them and then used whole-class feedback with similar examples. Pupils then revisited their own work to identify and correct mistakes without having exact answers to copy.
End-of-unit examples
End-of-unit examples
Reviewing impact Student voice from my classes reported an increased confidence in identifying and correcting their own errors, as well as responding that they believed it was helping their progress.
Observationally, I also noticed an increase in my pupils’ independence and resilience. By letting students become the detectives, the case is now theirs to crack – and the learning is far more powerful.
Balancing ‘find and fix’ with direct support is key. These strategies build metacognition but only work when core knowledge is secure. Continuing to embed these principles echoes the EEF’s wider message across the guidance report: balancing explicit instruction with opportunities for independent reasoning supports sustained improvement in mathematical learning.
