What to do after a mock: into the classroom with whole class feedback

A reflection on how to deal with whole class feedback after a mock or practice test. In summary this blog suggests you should:


Broadly, if the questions in the test reveal that there is an area of content (a domain) your students don’t know, the response isn’t to focus on those questions, but to go back to that area of content (the domain) and reteach it.

My thoughts in that post were very general and theoretical. I didn’t really go into detail about what to actually do beyond saying “go back to the domain.” In this post I want to go through what I actually do and how I marry this bit of assessment theory with the increasingly popular idea of whole class feedback (WCF). In a nutshell, WCF is a way of checking students’ work and giving them feedback but without faffing around with time consuming written comments that don’t help anybody (for more on marking, see here). You take in the students’ work, read it all, and on a sheet of paper you jot down some common problems or things you want to address, bring those up in class and expect students to amend and correct their work. Easy.

In sum then, when going over a mock or any other piece of assessed work:

1. Think hard about what the students’ responses tell you about their knowledge
2. Split your findings into two piles: “things I care about” and “things I don’t care about”
3. For things you don’t care about, either forget them or change the test for next time
4. For things you do care about, split into two piles: “for reteaching” and “for building in”
5. Reteach and build in!

The full post is much more detailed, take a look if you are able to.

https://achemicalorthodoxy.wordpress.com/2019/11/21/what-to-do-after-a-mock-into-the-classroom-with-whole-class-feedback/