4.3 What activities do English First Additional Language teachers participate in in
4.3.1 Moderation of written work
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4.3 What activities do English First Additional Language teachers participate in in
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standards of that particular subject. Moderation is also conducted so that feedback can be provided to the relevant teachers with the aim of improving the quality of school based assessment and teacher practice. The DoE (2008) policy also states that moderation is a process whereby the learners work is reviewed by someone who was not the assessor, who is called the moderator. The moderator reviews the results against the pre-specified criteria, which is the moderation or marking grid (see appendix H).
The learners‘ school based assessment was marked at school level by individual teachers and then moderated by the head of department (HOD). Moderation at school level meant that the EFAL teacher submitted all of his or her learner‘s written work to the HOD after she had marked it. The HOD then took about five scripts from the pile, some with low marks, high marks and average marks. The HOD remarks the scripts to see if the teachers had marked the learners‘ work correctly and fairly. If the HOD discovered some mistakes he or she discusses them with the teachers and they establish where there might have been a mistake and the teacher remarked if there was a need to do so. Thereafter, the teachers met in their cluster meetings to moderate the same school based assessment that had been moderated by the head of department at school level. In the EFAL clusters that I observed, the moderation was done using the marking grid, which showed how marks should be allocated for different sections of the learner‘s work that was being assessed.
During the moderation process, each teacher swooped learners‘ written work with another teacher. Each teacher brought ten of their learners‘ written work to be moderated, as mentioned by Mrs Nombewu:
We bring ten percent of our learner’s scripts and exchange. So we are going to bring about ten scripts of the students. Then you will find one teachers, you exchange the scripts and we remark.
Teachers mentioned that they all used the same criteria to select learners‘ work that was to be taken to moderation. They choose learners with the highest mark, learners with
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mediocre marks and learners with the lowest marks evenly. Teachers had also brought their personal files and mark sheets to the cluster meeting. Teachers‘ personal files consisted of mark sheets of all grades that they taught, subject policies, minutes of meetings that they had attended, work schedules and daily plans. The teachers had to come to the clusters with the original marks already erased on the learner‘s written work.
This was done so that the teachers would not be influenced by the marks that were already allocated to the learners. The teachers then used the marking grid to remark the essays, letters and short transactional pieces that the learners had written in their examinations and wrote the new marks on the learner‘s scripts, which the teachers called the ‗moderated marks‘. After moderation, the teachers discussed the marks, and original marks were revealed and compared against the moderated marks. If there was a difference of less than five marks between the original and the moderated marks, the marks stayed the same. Miss Ngwane explained what they did below:
First of all we moderate the work of the pupils. I go there with my marking being Done and when I go we exchange the work of the pupils after that we discuss anything that we found when marking the work of the learners and we also talk about things to be done in future.
If there was a difference of more than five marks, the teachers had discuss the marks and identify why there was a difference in the marks and they had to agree on a new mark to allocate to the learners. The teachers indicated that the adjustment of marks was not an easy task to do because they sometimes felt as if their competence was being questioned.
They felt like this because sometimes they had to give reasons about the big difference between the original marks and the moderated marks. They also did not enjoy adjusting marks because other teachers would assume that the teachers had not marked the learners‘ work properly. Teachers indicated that sometimes they felt humiliated when they had to adjust learner‘s marks, as indicated by Ms Mona:
There are challenges whereby we don’t reach an agreement. Whereby I come with learners marks and they do not want to listen. I say this learner deserves
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this mark and the other teacher says no this learner deserves that mark.
There is a criteria for marking, but sometimes we don’t use it the right way.
I also witnessed this tension that transpired during the adjustment of marks as mentioned by the previous teacher‘s statement in one of the meetings I attended. One teacher had to give reasons for the big difference in marks, and she was very defensive about adjustment done to her marks. Her learner‘s marks were too high and the moderator felt that she had not given a true reflection of the learner‘s performance. Her marks were about ten to fifteen marks higher than the moderated marks. The teacher did not want to comply with her colleague and adjust the marks. The colleague asked for the cluster coordinator‘s intervention in the matter. The cluster coordinator then took the scripts and moderated them himself. Again the cluster coordinator also gave the learners lower marks than the teacher had given them, it was then agreed that the teacher had to agree with her colleagues and bring down her marks, even though she was not happy with the adjustment. However, the teacher was made aware that she did not have to agree to the adjustment, but had a choice of forwarding the matter to the subject advisor and asking her to moderate her marks. However, she opted for an adjustment of her marks, rather than forwarding the matter to the subject advisor. I did not observe any other difficulty with the majority of the other teachers when they were moderating each other‘s work.