No More Marking & Comparative Judgement

Aims To understand what Comparative Judgement means To understand how No More Marking can support teachers in making comparative judgements To know how Water Hall currently uses No More Marking and Comparative Judgements

No More Marking says that if you have the following needs, you need comparative judgement.

So, what is comparative judgement?

What is comparative judgement? The best people to explain this, are the minds behind No More Marking https://vimeo.com/182568118

Why Comparative Judgement Works and Marking Does Not Work Marking does not work when it involves any degree of human judgement. This is due to a simple principle. "There is no absolute judgment. All judgments are comparisons of one thing with another". (Human Judgment: The Eye of the Beholder by Donald Laming, p.9). Laming has shown that at best our judgments are ordinal. We can place things in an order, but scarcely more than this. Ask two people to apply a mark scheme and you will most likely get different marks. Ask people to place two scripts in order, and you will get more consistency. This demonstration illustrates this principle. https://www.nomoremarking.com/demo1

What does it look like in schools?

At Water Hall... No More Marking is the system we use to do comparative judgements against pieces of writing from children at Water Hall. The system is free for schools to use (unless you require support packages) and involves minimal setup from teachers. Work (known as candidates) is scanned into the computer. The owner of the moderation then decides who will be a moderator and how many judgements will be made (NMM suggest 5 per piece) Once the moderation has been set up, moderators are emailed a secure link. This link allows them to access the comparative judgements. Moderators are shown 2 pieces of work side by side and are asked to select ‘the better response’. At Water Hall, we ask teachers to select the better piece of writing. Moderators do this independently until they have made the number of judgements set by the lead moderator. Currently, we choose to only make judgements on one specific text type as it is easier for professionals new to teaching to make more accurate judgements. NMM would argue that this should not always be the case as you should be thinking about a writer as a whole rather than the ability to write one set text type.

Once judging has concluded, the results correlate on a table visible to the lead moderator. The work has now been ranked from the best piece (the piece deemed to be the best compared to others the most) all the way down to the piece deemed to be the least effective. From this data you can then do many investigations. Comparative judgement is, at the moment, an effective professional dialogue prompt. At Water Hall, when we judge whole year groups, we will choose one of the following focuses to pull out of the data. Who is at the top and why? How can we push them further? Who is at the bottom and why? How can we get them to make accelerated progress? Which children are consistently mid-range and how can we enable these children to progress? You can also compare & judge work from specific groups of children like; target children Pupil Premium children, EAL Learners, SEND etc. At Water Hall, we choose to add in to our initial judgment, work that had already met end of year expectations for year 6 from the previous cohort. This way, we could see how the current year 6 writing compared to children meeting the standard last year. Children that are above and below these pieces prompt interesting and thoughtful dialogue from teachers & support staff.

What else has persuaded us to move to this way of accurate moderation?

Accuracy rate for using Comparative Judgements 0.8/0.9 Accuracy rate for using Comparative Judgements 145 The number of judgements 6 professionals made on 23 pieces of work in only 5 minutes! £0 The total cost of the software to the school.

Place your screenshot here No More Marking is an easy to use website that enables teachers to upload work, invite other moderators and make judgements quickly and easily.

Judgements can be made on laptops and mobile devices so it is accessible to any moderators that wish to take part in the comparative judgement.

Thanks! Any questions? The experts at No More Marking support@nomoremarking.com