"The pay is not worth it but it is excellent PD": Australian teachers' perspectives on doing large-scale marking

Nathanael Reinertsen
Australian Council for Educational Research, Australia

Anecdotally, teachers take up opportunities to mark large-scale assessments because they are told by colleagues that it is 'good PD'. Assertions about the value of marking are passed along with little question. However, research into the benefits of participating as a marker in large-scale marking has not been conducted in the Australian context. This paper reports the results of an online survey of Australian teachers (N=43) about their participation in large-scale marking in order to examine whether the research that has been conducted internationally is likely to be generalisable to Australia. The responses to the survey are described and then compared with four main areas of benefit identified in the literature. It found that Australian teachers' views of large-scale marking are similar to those of their international colleagues, and that teachers report a broad and varied range of benefits. Additionally, it was found that survey respondents identified a range of costs and drawbacks of marking that have not been reported in the literature, but that in spite of these the respondents would still recommend the experience to other teachers.
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Author: Nathanael Reinertsen is a Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research. The survey reported in this paper was part of the research project he conducted as a PhD candidate at Edith Cowan University. Email: nathanael.reinertsen@acer.org Please cite as: Reinertsen, N. (2020). "The pay is not worth it but it is excellent PD": Australian teachers' perspectives on doing large-scale marking. Issues in Educational Research, 30(2), 655-672. http://www.iier.org.au/iier30/reinertsen.pdf