Marking assessments and providing quality feedback is part of the bread and butter of an educator. However, GTAs can often feel like they are thrown in at the deep end when asked to assist with marking coursework or exams, often due to a relative lack of experience. As a former GTA myself, I empathise with this feeling and remember during my early days of marking that heightened sense of responsibility to the students whose work I was marking, which at times could feel overwhelming. Therefore, when I took on the role of GTA coordinator in the School of Psychology in 2022, I knew this was going to be an area that I’d want to work on in terms of improving support for GTAs. 

Step 1: Understanding what was available already, and what was needed 

Step 2: Developing the training

I first established what was provided in the training on assessment and feedback through Elevate, to make sure I wasn’t duplicating efforts, and instead focussed on including information that was more tailored to how we provide assessment and feedback within the School of Psychology. For example, outlining the Programme Level Approach we have, and highlighting how feedback provided to students on a lab report at Level 1 will be applicable to future assessments the students will have at Level 2. I also provided an overview of how our undergraduate curriculum is structured as some GTAs had indicated that it would be helpful to know how the module they’re marking on sits among the course more broadly. During development of the training, I also emailed all staff in the school to see what strategies they use to mark more efficiently, and created a list of suggestions that I could share and discuss with the GTAs. Several staff members also asked me if they could see the list too as they were also keen to learn if there was anything on there they could try to make their marking more efficient too, which tells me that this is something that applies to markers at all levels! 

Step 3: Delivering the training

GTAs were invited to attend a one-hour workshop - this was compulsory for GTAs who were going to be involved in marking, but optional for those who were not going to be marking but still wanted to develop their knowledge in this area. 

The training outlined some more practical information initially such as how to access scripts via Turnitin, when to apply penalties, and what to look for when checking the Turnitin similarity report. The bulk of the workshop was spent marking example introduction sections to a lab report. GTAs were provided with marking criteria and were then asked to read each of the introductions and determine what grade they would give that section and why. This then led into the subsequent activity where GTAs were asked to condense a number of feedback comments that had been left on an example introduction (e.g. “rationale is unclear”, “these sentences don’t link together very clearly”), to create one feedback comment for the section that clearly aligned with the marking criteria and was actionable. This task was designed as such because we typically ask markers in the School of Psychology to provide one feedback comment per section or per marking criteria - this creates greater consistency in terms of the number of feedback comments each student receives.  I asked GTAs to enter their condensed feedback comments into a Wooclap quiz and then shared these on screen so that everyone could see them, whilst maintaining the anonymity of the contributor. This generated a discussion about where feedback was clear and where it could be improved so that a student would have a better understanding of how to improve their work in the future. Finally, we discussed the list of suggestions from staff about how to mark more efficiently and how GTAs could implement some of these strategies themselves. 

Step 4: Reflecting

• Slides used in the training workshops are available here.

• List of suggestions from staff on how to mark more efficiently are here.