Resource 4: Marking criteria for posters

Background information / subject knowledge for teacher

Marking criteria

When you mark questions about scientific topics, it is easy to decide if it is right or wrong. You might correct the answers, or ask your students to correct them themselves. Whatever you do, you should make sure that you provide some feedback so that your students know how to improve.

Teachers sometimes don’t like setting open-ended tasks or project work because it is much more difficult to mark. However, these sorts of activities will help your students to learn and they will tell you a lot about your students.

To make it easier to mark projects, leaflets or posters, you need a set of criteria – things that you think are important. You should share the criteria with your students so they understand what is expected of them. You could even get them to suggest suitable criteria.

Once the criteria are clear, then you can mark the work – or you can encourage them to mark each others’. They will need to do this a few times to get used to it – but they will get better at it. At first, encourage them just to give positive feedback: ‘I liked the way you have ...’ or ‘You have made that really clear ...’ As they get more used to looking at each others’ work, they might be able to suggest improvements: ‘I really like the diagram that shows melting – it would have been good if you had done one for dissolving as well.’

Possible criteria for assessing a teaching resource, a leaflet or a poster:

  • Is the information clearly laid out?
  • Is the information presented logically so it would help the learner?
  • Is the text well written?
  • Have they made good use of diagrams?
  • Are the key words clearly defined?
  • Is the information scientifically correct?
  • Is there evidence that the work is carefully planned?

For project work you might include:

  • Is there evidence of independent research?
  • Is the project clearly structured?

Resource 3: Using Models in Science

Resource 5: Revising with mind maps and concept maps