Beyond the Mark: A Better Way to Give Students Feedback

A mark tells a student how they performed.

Good feedback should do something more useful: help them understand why, identify what they should improve and show them how to do it better next time.

That is the thinking behind TeachEdge’s redesigned feedback in Quick Mark and Class Marking.

The new format makes feedback easier to scan, clearer to understand and more focused on improvement. Through Class Marking, teachers can provide that structured, individual feedback across a whole class, while reviewing and editing it before students receive it.

Clearer feedback at a glance

The new feedback card brings the most important information together so students can quickly see:

• their overall mark
• how they performed against the relevant assessment objectives or criteria
• what they did well
• their main improvement target
• what they should do differently next time

The aim is not simply to produce more feedback. One of the risks of AI-generated feedback is that it can become too detailed and overwhelming.

Instead, TeachEdge gives feedback a clear structure. The key messages are visible immediately, while detailed written commentary remains available for students and teachers who want to examine the answer more closely.

Figure 1: An example of the redesigned feedback in the teacher’s view, before it is released to the student.

Feedback that helps with the next answer

One of the biggest changes is the new Next step section.

Alongside identifying an area for improvement in the submitted answer, TeachEdge explains the underlying skill the student needs to develop.

That might mean developing a fuller chain of analysis, applying evidence more effectively or supporting a judgement more clearly.

These are transferable skills. A student may be writing about barriers to entry today and inflation next week, but the underlying weakness in their technique may be the same.

The Next step section therefore has four connected parts:

Transferable skill

The broader skill the student needs to develop.

In this answer

Where the issue appears in the work they have just submitted.

Next time

What they should do differently in a future answer.

Modelled improvement

What applying that skill could look like in this particular response.

That last part is especially useful. TeachEdge works from the ideas already present in the student’s response and shows how those ideas could be developed more effectively.

In the example above, the student identifies high costs and brand loyalty as barriers to entry. The feedback shows how to extend those points into a fuller explanation of their effect on contestability, followed by a judgement.

This makes the guidance concrete and achievable: this is what you were trying to do, and this is how you could take it further.

Teachers remain in control

In Class Marking, teachers can review and edit the feedback before releasing it to students. They retain professional control over the assessment and advice their class receives.

Feedback can also be printed where needed. Within Class Marking, students can be given another opportunity to respond, with the original feedback retained as a reference.

This supports a useful learning cycle:

submit → understand → improve → try again

Receiving feedback becomes a starting point for further work. Students have a specific target, an example to learn from and an opportunity to put the advice into practice.

Making individual feedback more achievable

Much of the discussion around AI in schools focuses on students using it to produce work for them.

There is also an opportunity to use AI to help students improve their own work.

A teacher might ideally want every student to receive a clear assessment breakdown, specific strengths, a carefully chosen improvement target and an example showing how to develop their answer. They might also want to provide detailed commentary and give students another opportunity to respond.

Providing that depth of individual feedback manually to a whole class after every substantial piece of work is extraordinarily difficult.

AI makes that level of individual feedback more achievable.

Saving teachers time matters. So does what that saved time makes possible: more opportunities for students to receive useful guidance, act on it and practise again, with teachers overseeing the process.

From marking to improvement

We have spent a great deal of time improving the accuracy of TeachEdge marking, and that remains fundamental.

The next question is what students can learn from the feedback they receive.

Our redesigned feedback is intended to make that learning easier: helping students understand their performance, recognise a skill they need to develop and see how to apply it.

Because ultimately, the mark is about the answer a student has already written. The best feedback helps them write the next one better.

Try the redesigned feedback with an individual response in Quick Mark, or use Class Marking to bring it to your whole class.