Interpreting examiners' annotations on examination papers: a sociocultural analysis

Abstract

In Ireland and the UK it is accepted practice that agencies with formal responsibility for delivering school examinations allow examination candidates, and in many cases their teachers, to see their examination papers once they have been marked. Returned papers can carry various pieces of information; as well as the total score given for a performance, additional information is included in the form of the annotations left on the examination paper by the marking examiner. As far as we know there has been no research into how this information affects those who come into contact with it. The study uses teacher interview and survey data to explore whether a sociocultural approach to analysis can illuminate the factors that might influence their interpretation of those annotations. These analyses suggest that a key influence on the valid interpretation of an examiner's annotations is a teachers' involvement in examining activity. The analyses support further conceptualisation that these teacher-examiners' interpretative capacity is related to their positioning in a boundary zone between two different activity systems.

Keywords:

• assessment
• activity theory
• examiner annotations
• examinations
• sociocultural theory
• interpretation

Notes

1. An Awarding Body is an institution that is allowed to award qualifications in the UK. In order for a qualification to be recognised as eligible for state funding it must be accredited through an Awarding Body that is regulated by a government-appointed statutory education body.

2. Full qualifications often comprise a number of component units.

3. GCSE is the main form of Level 1 and 2 national examination taken at the end of compulsory schooling in the UK.

4. The GCE is a Level 3 qualification and part of the tertiary Further Education process in the UK. GCEs include a number of Advanced Subsidiary (A-S) modules.

5. This is the proportion of respondents who completed the survey fully. Cooperation rates combine with response rates to give a measure of the degree to which a survey is or is not addressing issues that respondents feel to be important.