In partnership with The Writing Revolution, No More Marking are providing a new service which enables schools in America to measure progress in academic writing. Over the course of the academic year, you can join in with the assessments set by The Writing Revolution and judge your students’ progress using No More Marking’s Comparative Judgement engine. Assessments are available three times a year, for every grade.
Why are schools using us?
Speed
For a typical department with 6 teachers and 94 students, the judging takes one hour per teacher per year group.
Accuracy
Judging achieves the accuracy of double or triple marking within the time usually taken for single marking.
Validity
As all moderation judging is done anonymously by teachers working at other schools there is no possibility for bias based on school or student characteristics. All schools and all students are treated equally.
Comparative Judgement in 4 easy steps!
1We set the task, so everyone is writing against the same prompt.
2Upload your pupils’ scripts on our specially coded paper.
3Judge writing, comparing two pieces of writing on screen, side-by-side to determine which is best.
4Benchmark attainment and progress across your school, and nationally, with the information and statistics in your school’s individual report.
Here’s a summary of how it works
- Assessments are available three times a year, for every grade (schools can choose to take part in any).
- Each window involves a specific piece of writing where The Writing Revolution provides the stimulus.
- In each window you judge the work of your students as well as the work of students across the country.
- You are never asked to compare your students with students from another school. Similarly, teachers from other schools will never be asked to compare your students with their students. Rather, every 10th judgement is a moderation judgement where you compare the work of students from other schools.
- Our judgement process ensures every paper is externally moderated and all judging quality monitored in real time.
- You receive detailed information and levels for every student as well as detailed reports on progress.
Benefits of Assessing America’s Writing
Workload
A group of teachers can assess the writing of an entire grade within an hour.
Accuracy
Comparative judgement achieves greater levels of reliability for open tasks than traditional rubric approaches.
Validity
Holistic judgements of writing help you escape the tick list approach to assessing writing.
Progress measures
You can measure the progress of cohorts accurately across their entire education.
National comparisons
Every year thousands of students in America take part in assessments set by The Writing Revolution and run by No More Marking.
Robust data controls
Every judge’s performance is recorded, and decisions made by inaccurate judges are removed from the results.
Full technical support
Contact us using our online chatbox for a fast response.
Built-in moderation
As you are judging, you are silently and anonymously moderating the judgements of other teachers.
Assess every paper
With traditional moderation, most papers are never seen by anyone other than the class teacher. With us, every paper is seen twenty times by different teachers.
High quality reporting
Snapshot reports and progress reports allow you to celebrate the development of writing skills at your school.