By Carolina Kuepper-Tetzel

I have recently published a paper (with co-author Paul Gardner) on the effects of temporary mark withholding on academic performance and feedback views in university students (1). Temporary mark withholding is a feedback strategy whereby on assignments students are provided with the feedback first without their marks – then, a few days later, the marks are released to them. The idea behind temporary mark withholding is to provide students with time to engage and process the feedback before releasing the grades. Students tend to focus on grades at the expense of written feedback – which may be detrimental to increasing future performance. The exciting part about our paper is that we report two experiments that we ran in authentic learning environments where students worked on credit-bearing assignments. Thus, the conclusions that we can draw from our findings are highly relevant for real-world learning settings. In this post, I give a brief overview of the paper highlighting the findings and practical implications.

What did we do?

The experiments were run at two Scottish universities. The first experiment involved second-year Psychology students who worked on a report in their first semester. Half of the cohort was randomly assigned to the Grade-before-feedback condition – receiving their grades three days before their feedback – and the other half was assigned to the Feedback-before-grade condition – receiving their feedback three days before their grades. We were interested whether this manipulation would affect a similar future assignment in the second semester.

The second experiment used a bit of a different approach. We assigned an entire student cohort of third-year Psychology students to the temporary mark withholding condition for their report assignment in semester 1 and measured their performance in a similar assignment in semester 2. However, it was important to have a control condition to compare any changes in performance between the two semesters to. We used a historical control for that purpose: As historical control we took the third-year students from the previous year who did not experience mark withholding (marks and individual feedback were released at the same time) and looked at their semester 1 to semester 2 report performance change. In addition to academic performance, we were also able to look at whether students viewed their feedback in semester 1 or not.

 What did we find?

Using very different approaches in both of our experiments, we found converging evidence for benefits of temporary mark withholding on academic performance. More specifically, there was an increase in performance between the semester 1 and 2 reports in the conditions where feedback was provided before grades were released, and this increase was either reduced (Experiment 1) or eliminated (Experiment 2) when grades were provided before or alongside written feedback. In addition, we found that more students viewed their feedback in the mark withholding cohort compared to the historical control cohort. We did not find evidence that feedback views mediated the increase in performance. However, feedback view count is a rough measure for feedback engagement and from our data we can’t draw stronger conclusions regarding feedback engagement quality.

Where does this leave us?

Temporary mark withholding looks like a promising feedback approach. We find increases in performance between similar assignments that were set one semester apart. We also find that more students viewed their feedback when mark withholding was in place. From our finding, we would endorse temporary mark withholding as a valuable approach.

I would like, however, to point out two aspects based on reading different papers and from speaking to students:

• Be transparent about temporary mark withholding. Explain to your students why you are doing it and set expectations in advance. Tell them exactly when they can expect to receive feedback and their grades.

• Provide students with short feedback engagement tasks after they received their feedback and before their marks are released. This can help students to engage in self-assessment and help them understand their feedback. Here is a blog post with ideas on how to accomplish this.

Our paper is freely accessible for everyone to read online. Take a look particularly at the Introduction and Discussion sections to get a more in-depth idea of the research – we know that the Results part in scientific papers can get a bit technical. If you are thinking about or already are implementing temporary mark withholding in your teaching practice, share it with me by tweeting about it and tagging me on Twitter or write me an email. I always enjoy learning about different approaches to implementing strategies in practice.

References:

(1) Kuepper-Tetzel, C. E., & Gardner, P. L. (2021). Effects of temporary mark withholding on academic performance. Psychology Learning & Teaching, 1475725721999958.