Learning Comes First

In September 1895, a seventeen-year-old called Edyth Balsley began learning to be a telegraph operator in the Western Union office at Brookville, a small town in Indiana. Telegraph operators sent and received messages in Morse code, a language of short and long clicks. Every Saturday that winter, a researcher called Noble Harter gave her sentences she had never heard before and counted how many letters she could take down in a few minutes.^[1]

Harter and the psychologist William Bryan tested other learners in the same way and drew each one’s progress as a line on a graph. For the first weeks, the line went up. Then it went almost flat. In their words, “For many weeks there is an improvement which the student can feel sure of and which is proved by objective tests. Then follows a long period when the student can feel no improvement, and when objective tests show little or none.”^[1]

During that long period, the real messages passing between stations were still “a senseless clatter” to a learner, almost as hard to follow as they had been months before. For the learners who kept going, something strange happened next: “Suddenly, within a few days, the change comes, and the senseless clatter becomes intelligible speech.”^[1]

So what was happening on the flat part of the line? If the tests showed nothing, was anything being learned at all? Bryan and Harter were sure it was, and their reason is one every GCSE family can use: “no one is able to omit this period.”^[1]

A test can land on the flat part

Now put a student in Edyth’s place. Suppose your daughter begins a new way of writing essays in September, and her school holds a mock in November. She has met a new paragraph structure, new words for what a writer does, and a mark scheme she is reading properly for the first time. Her mock grade comes back the same as last year’s, or a little lower. What does that grade tell you about June?

In our experience, it tells you very little. The grade was taken on the flat part of the line, like one of Edyth’s Saturday tests in the middle of winter. Before a student’s work changes properly, they have to understand a great deal that a grade cannot show, and in our experience that understanding takes two to three months. A mock or a school test in those months records where the student was while the change was still underway.

A Better Mock Can Mean a Worse GCSE explains why a mock is worth more as a rehearsal than as a prediction. The question here comes earlier: what is a student actually doing in those first months, when the grade stays still?

Six things to understand before the writing changes

The first thing is how the subject works. GCSE English rewards an argument about what a writer means and how they make the reader feel it. The argument is built from the writer’s own words, rather than from a list of facts about the text. A student who still thinks of an essay as “everything I know about the book” has not yet understood what the exam is asking for.

The second is how the mark scheme works. Every exam board’s mark scheme describes answers in levels, and the difference between one level and the next often comes down to a few precise words. Knowing the Mark Scheme Is Not Understanding It shows how easily those words are misread. The third is which techniques to use. We teach a paragraph structure called TTECEA, whose letters name the parts of an analytical paragraph, from the topic sentence to the author’s purpose, and Learning Is Change explains each part.

The fourth is the goal of the subject: what an examiner is hoping to find when they open the script. The fifth is what the student is getting right and what they are getting wrong, read from their own marked work. The sixth is how to improve, which means knowing the next step for this paragraph rather than a general wish to “do better”.

These six fit neatly into a model of feedback that the researchers John Hattie and Helen Timperley published in 2007. They argued that useful feedback answers three questions: “Where am I going? How am I going? and Where to next?”^[2][3] The subject, the mark scheme, the techniques and the goal answer the first question. What is right and what is wrong answers the second, and how to improve answers the third.

Picture two students who get back the same marked essay. The first reads the grade, feels disappointed and puts the essay in a folder. The second reads the comments and can say, “The goal is an argument, I am losing marks on the effect on the reader, and next time I will explain two effects for every quotation.” Both took the same test, but only the second knows what to do next.

Learning can happen before it shows

About thirty years after Bryan and Harter, psychologists at the University of California found something similar in rats. In 1929, Hugh Blodgett put hungry rats in a maze with no food at the end. They wandered about and did not seem to improve. However, once food was placed at the end of the maze, their mistakes “immediately dropped to a level comparable to rats” that had been rewarded from the start.^[4] Edward Tolman and Charles Honzik repeated the experiment in 1930: for ten days some rats ran the maze for nothing, and when food appeared on the eleventh day, they quickly caught up with the rats that had been fed all along.^[4][5]

The rats had been learning the maze the whole time. It did not show until they had a reason to use it. Two researchers who study learning, Nicholas Soderstrom and Robert Bjork, summarise the finding plainly: “learning can occur even when no discernible changes in performance are observed.”^[4] Rats in a maze are a long way from teenagers writing essays, so we treat this as a picture of what can happen rather than a measurement of it.

Here is how it can look in English. A student spends October learning what “the effect on the reader” means. Their paragraphs still read much as before, and a school test that month gives the same grade. Then, in a practice question in December, they write two clear effects for every quotation, without being reminded. The understanding had been growing for weeks before it appeared on the page.

Chasing the grade can slow the learning

When grades do not move, the obvious fix is to watch the grades more closely: more tests, more marks and more talk about the number. The psychologist Ruth Butler tested what happens when pupils are given grades instead of comments. She gave 200 pupils aged about ten to twelve three sessions of thinking puzzles. After the first two sessions, some received written comments, some received a number, some received general praise and some received nothing.^[6]

By the third session, the pupils who had received comments showed the most interest and did the best work. That held for high achievers and low achievers alike. Grades and praise worked in much the same way as each other: both turned the pupils’ attention away from the task and towards how able they looked. These were younger children working on puzzles rather than essays. Even so, in our experience the same thing happens when a mock grade arrives: the conversation at home turns to the number.

A much larger study looked at essays. Hattie and four colleagues examined 3,204 secondary school and university students who wrote an essay, received comments and then handed in a second version.^[3] The comments that led to the greatest gains between the first and final version were the “where to next” comments, which told students what to do next. Praise was among the comments that led to the smallest gains.

Understanding the mark scheme lasts

Can understanding how work is judged make a lasting difference? Chris Rust, Margaret Price and Berry O’Donovan tested this with first-year university business students.^[7] A week before a workshop, students received two sample assignments, one excellent and one that only just passed. With the marking criteria in front of them, they tried marking both. In a 90-minute workshop, they compared their marks in small groups, and a tutor explained each criterion and the tutor’s own marks.

Before the workshop, the students who went and the students who did not scored about the same. On the assignment that followed, the students who had attended scored about 60 out of 100, against about 53 or 54 for those who had not. One year later, on a different course, the students who had attended still scored about 58, against about 51.^[7]

A mock grade belongs to one paper, but an understanding of the subject goes with the student to the next paper and the one after it. In our experience, students who come through those first months knowing what the examiner wants, what they are getting wrong and what to do next keep improving long after the first grade has been forgotten.

The parent’s part in the flat months

What should a family do while the line is flat? When Bryan and Harter asked at telegraph schools, they were told that between 60 and 75 of every 100 beginners “become discouraged upon the plateau”.^[1] In our experience, the risk for a GCSE student is the same: a disappointing test in the first months feels like proof that the new way is not working, so the student goes back to the way they wrote before.

When a grade like that comes home, ask us why it looks the way it does, and we will explain where your child is in the process. Then help your child listen to the feedback and use it, even on a day when the grade does not look right to you. Who Is Responsible? explains why the learning itself can only be done by the student.

Edyth Balsley’s Saturday tests in the middle of winter could not show what was happening underneath them. A test in November cannot show it either. The grade that matters is the one in June, and it rests on the understanding a student builds in the months when nothing seems to change.

Five things to do this week

1. Students: write the goal in one sentence. Read the top level of the mark scheme for one question you will sit, and write in your own words what it asks for.

2. Students: sort your last marked piece into three lines. Write one thing you got right, one thing you got wrong, and one thing you will do next time.

3. Students: redraft one paragraph from its feedback. Before you start a new essay, rewrite a single paragraph so that it fixes the comment it received.

4. Parents: ask the three questions instead of “What did you get?” Ask your child where they are going, how they are doing and what they will do next. If they cannot answer yet, ask them to find out from their feedback.

5. Parents: when a test grade disappoints in the first months, ask us why. We will explain what it shows and what it does not, and you can help your child keep listening to the feedback.

If you would like to know where your child’s own writing stands today, our free assessment takes five minutes.

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