Teaching & Learning

What the Marks Don't Tell Us 

This is the beginning of the busy season for assessment. Our Year 12 students have begun their trial examinations, and across Years 2 to 11 many students are sitting the ICAS assessments. It's natural, when the papers or results come back, for everyone - students, parents, and teachers alike - to look first at the number at the top of the page. But that number rarely tells the whole story, and this month I wanted to explain why. 

Performance is not the same thing as learning. 

These two words sound interchangeable, but researchers draw a sharp line between them. Performance is what a student can do right now, on this task, on this day. Learning is the more durable change that lasts and can be drawn on weeks or months later. In their influential review, psychologists Nicholas Soderstrom and Robert Bjork argue that the two often come apart: strong performance today can mask shallow learning, and - encouragingly - a shaky performance today can sit on top of learning that is actually taking hold. As their work puts it, "current performance is not a reliable index of learning, which can only be measured by recall after a delay." A single trial or ICAS paper is a snapshot of performance. It is useful, but it is not the final word on what a child has learned. 

Which is why the hard stuff matters. 

One of the most robust findings in the science of learning is that the conditions which make learning feel harder in the moment are often the very ones that make it stick. Robert and Elizabeth Bjork call these "desirable difficulties" - spacing practice out over time, testing yourself rather than re-reading, mixing up problem types. Their memorable phrase is that we should try "making things hard on ourselves, but in a good way." This is exactly the spirit of an assessment like ICAS, which is deliberately stretching and deliberately unfamiliar. When a child finds it challenging, that is not a sign something has gone wrong. It is often the sign that real thinking - the kind that lasts - is underway. 

So the most valuable part of the page is not the mark. It's the feedback. 

Decades of research point the same way: John Hattie and Helen Timperley describe feedback as one of the most powerful influences on achievement we know of. But there's a catch, and it's an important one for us as parents and teachers. In a classic study, Ruth Butler gave students work back in three ways - a grade only, comments only, or grades and comments. The students who received thoughtful comments engaged with the task and improved; those who received a grade tended to glance at the number and stop there, even when helpful comments sat right beside it. The mark, it turns out, can crowd out the very information that would help a child improve. 

The practical takeaway is a small change in the questions we ask at home. Instead of "What did you get?", try "What did the teacher's comments say?" and "What will you do differently next time?" It shifts the conversation from the score to the learning - and, quietly, it teaches our children where the real value lies. 

A word, finally, on comparison. 

Trials season is when comparison spikes, and it's worth naming. Australian researcher Herbert Marsh has spent a career documenting what he calls the "big-fish-little-pond effect": able students in high-achieving settings often judge themselves more harshly, not because they are learning less, but simply because they are surrounded by other capable peers. It's a useful reminder that a mark only means something in the context of that particular room on that particular day. The more helpful question is always the personal one: Is this child growing? Are they more capable this term than last? That is the race worth running. 

So as the results come home over the coming weeks, I'd gently encourage all of us to look past the number to the learning underneath it - to treat difficulty as a good sign, feedback as the real prize, and each child's own progress as the measure that matters most. 

Nash Clark 

Director of Teaching and Learning