ScaMP Feedback: Scaffolded, Modelled, Precise
At Top Marks AI, our aim is to do more than measure understanding. Our aim is to improve it. This piece explains the ScaMP framework — the pedagogical principles behind the feedback every Top Marks tool produces.
The Challenges of Formative Feedback
Summative assessment tells us what students are currently capable of. Helping them make progress requires something more time-consuming to produce and harder to do well: formative feedback.
One of the most common problems that limits the effectiveness of formative feedback is vagueness. Both AI feedback and teacher feedback can be afflicted by adjectives that sound like helpful signposts but are often too imprecise to help students make progress. When a teacher writes "more detail here would help," this is only useful to a student who already understands what "more detail" means in the specific context of the question they are answering. Similarly, a note reminding a student that the tone of their essay is inconsistent can only be acted on to the extent that they already understand what makes their essay inconsistent. Other problematic examples: "try being more creative," or "use more descriptive words."
A second problem is that providing students with examples of higher-level achievement — a model essay, another student's work — can be less effective than it seems. Students recognise strong work, but model essays often show the gap between levels without explaining how to bridge it. The most useful model is one that is just one step ahead of the student: in Vygotsky's proximal zone of development. When the gap is the right size, it is not only easier for students to understand something new; it gives them the confidence that they can bridge it.
Finally, preparing students for exams means not only teaching them the subject knowledge and skills they will need — it means teaching them to think about exams like an examiner. Students who understand what an examiner will give them marks for are best placed to use their knowledge and skills to achieve the grade they are capable of.
A student response to an AQA English Language speech question, as it appears in the Top Marks AI platform.
Three Principles
With these difficulties in mind, Top Marks AI's formative feedback is built on three principles: Scaffolding, Modelling, and Precision.
Scaffolded
Feedback is calibrated to the level the student is writing at, and points towards the next level up — not an idealised end point far beyond their reach.
Modelled
Where possible, feedback provides a concrete example — a rewritten phrase, an alternative opening — so that students can see what improvement looks like, not just hear that it is needed.
Precise
Feedback is anchored to specific moments in the student's response and connected explicitly to the relevant mark scheme criteria, so it is always clear why something matters.
Our feedback harnesses these three ideas to maximise what students are able to learn, and is organised to help students — and less experienced teachers — develop their awareness of each question's guiding principles: the assessment objectives.
Precision in Practice: Connecting Writing to the Mark Scheme
The opening bullet points in each section of Top Marks AI's feedback reinforce what the student did well — crucially, by connecting the specific material they wrote with key ideas from the mark scheme. In the example above, Top Marks AI tells the student that "Hello fellow council members" is a strong way to begin a speech, and that this is what it means to "match tone to purpose." Through repeated practice, students begin to understand even the most opaque mark-scheme phrases. Abstract understanding is reached most reliably through the concrete.
Scaffolding in Practice: One Step Ahead
The Constructive Feedback bullet points scaffold the student's progress towards the next level of the mark scheme. Recognising at which level the student is writing, Top Marks AI makes suggestions appropriate for someone writing one level above where they currently are.
A student already deploying vocabulary like "accessibility," "infrequent," or the journalistic phrase "some say" is ready to try a phrase like "the prohibitive expense of public transportation." A lower-ability student will be offered scaffolding that illustrates the most essential ideas:
Constructive Feedback: To improve their communication to the next level, the student could transform the informal opening "I think cars are good because they help people get places faster and public transport is really bad especially round here!" into a more formal speech introduction such as: "Chairperson, councillors and members of the public, thank you for allowing me to speak today about the critical issue of transportation in our community."
To make sure students can't miss what's essential, Top Marks AI also provides a summary in the familiar form of What Went Well and Even Better If statements.
Full feedback output: assessment objective breakdown, Constructive Feedback scaffolds, and student-friendly What Went Well / Even Better If summary.
Helping Teachers — in Different Ways
By encouraging students to understand assessment objectives, and providing them with precise feedback and scaffolded models to learn from, we aim to help students get as much out of formative feedback as possible. But there is a second beneficiary: the teacher.
One idea that is easily overlooked is that practice makes progress. The concept of "matching form to purpose" might be understood by a student in one lesson on one day, but fade from memory. Progress is embedded over time when students work through these ideas repeatedly — in the hands of a capable teacher.
Top Marks AI's feedback is designed to give teachers a starting point. Where lower-ability students consistently fail to match form to purpose when writing a newspaper article or a speech, Top Marks AI will surface a specific suggestion — a headline with colons and catchy adjectives, or different ways to open a speech. These become the basis of classroom activities: asking students to come up with three potential titles for their article, or to give a title to a real article whose title the teacher has removed.
By pointing to the key ideas in the mark scheme and introducing scaffolded models, Top Marks AI's feedback gives teachers focused starting points for activities, or even a whole lesson. The aim is to help teachers deliver lessons structured around progress, whilst reducing the time it takes to plan them.
One of 400+ individually calibrated Top Marks AI tools — each surfacing ScaMP feedback tailored to its specific mark scheme.
Beyond the Individual Essay: Whole-Class Feedback
The same ScaMP principles that shape individual essay feedback also drive Top Marks AI's whole-class feedback feature. Rather than requiring teachers to read every script before identifying common gaps, Top Marks AI aggregates patterns across the class — surfacing the assessment objectives that students as a group are not yet understanding clearly. The same logic applies: feedback is precise (anchored to specific mark scheme criteria), scaffolded (pointing to the next step), and modelled (with concrete examples teachers can use directly in class).
The goal is not to produce a grade and move on. It is to give every student — whatever their starting point — a concrete, achievable next step. And to give every teacher the material they need to help their students take it.
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