More tips from Craig Barton
Video transcript
hello i’m craig barton and welcome to this tips for teachers video now i want you to imagine that what you see on the screen here is one of your students either low stakes quizzes or homeworks or assessments or whatever it may be crucially the students had a go at it and then when they’ve seen the answers they’ve then corrected it so maybe you can see here that the corrections are done in this kind of green color now that sounds like a really sensible idea right the student has a go at it and then make sure that they’ve got the corrections but here’s my question what are we actually expecting the students to do with those corrections imagine you’ve got a really conscientious student who wants to use those corrections to help them learn well best case they can find this piece of paper wherever it may be and that’s that’s asking for something straight away and then they could read over the corrections but certainly from maths and i assume this is true in other subjects simply reading over things is no way of testing whether you actually understand it the problem with corrections like this is they’re not quizzable if a student wants to let’s say for example redo question two they’ve got to somehow become some kind of contortion artist and cover up the answer so that they can just read the question or they’ve got to go through the process of copying out the questions somewhere whereas at the same time they’ve probably already seen the answer it just doesn’t quite work corrections like this are not that useful a learning device going forward but with a slight twist i think they can be so what i ask my students to do is not do corrections on the paper itself on the quiz on the homework or whatever but instead to do it on card so for each mistake that they’ve made on one side of the card i get them to copy the question out and if it’s a particularly long question perhaps i can provide a print out for them so they can stick it on and on the other side of the card i ask them to write three things first what topic is it what area of the curriculum is this that’s really important so that they start to realize areas of strength and weakness and they know therefore they’ve got a label attached to something that they can then follow up on if they’ve got some other revision resource then i get them to articulate their mistakes so they have some ownership of it and finally then i get them to do the correction now the big difference here of course is now this is entirely quizzable because a student a week later a month later six months later or whatever can look at one side of this card and see the question try to answer it on a different piece of paper or whatever and then turn over the card and check whether they’ve got it right and if they’ve got it right put it to the bottom of the pile if they’ve got it wrong put it half way down the pile so that it bubbles up again in the future and of course the more you do this you end up with a big stack of essentially personalized quizable revision cards which are infinitely more useful to students than simply doing corrections so what do you think about that is that a useful tip is that something you could use in your subject how would you need to tweak and refine it let me know and if you found it useful please could you like the video and subscribe to the tips for teachers youtube channel i’d be eternally grateful there’s loads more tips as well at tips for teachers dot co dot uk thanks so much for watching