14 Examples of Formative Assessment [+FAQs]

formative assessment discussion

Traditional student assessment typically comes in the form of a test, pop quiz, or more thorough final exam. But as many teachers will tell you, these rarely tell the whole story or accurately determine just how well a student has learned a concept or lesson.

That’s why many teachers are utilizing formative assessments. While formative assessment is not necessarily a new tool, it is becoming increasingly popular amongst K-12 educators across all subject levels. 

Curious? Read on to learn more about types of formative assessment and where you can access additional resources to help you incorporate this new evaluation style into your classroom.

What is Formative Assessment?

Online education glossary EdGlossary defines formative assessment as “a wide variety of methods that teachers use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course.” They continue, “formative assessments help teachers identify concepts that students are struggling to understand, skills they are having difficulty acquiring, or learning standards they have not yet achieved so that adjustments can be made to lessons, instructional techniques, and academic support.”

The primary reason educators utilize formative assessment, and its primary goal, is to measure a student’s understanding while instruction is happening. Formative assessments allow teachers to collect lots of information about a student’s comprehension while they’re learning, which in turn allows them to make adjustments and improvements in the moment. And, the results speak for themselves — formative assessment has been proven to be highly effective in raising the level of student attainment, increasing equity of student outcomes, and improving students’ ability to learn, according to a study from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). 

On the flipside of the assessment coin is summative assessments, which are what we typically use to evaluate student learning. Summative assessments are used after a specific instructional period, such as at the end of a unit, course, semester, or even school year. As learning and formative assessment expert Paul Black puts it, “when the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative assessment. When a customer tastes the soup, that’s summative assessment.”

formative assessment discussion

14 Examples of Formative Assessment Tools & Strategies

There are many types of formative assessment tools and strategies available to teachers, and it’s even possible to come up with your own. However, here are some of the most popular and useful formative assessments being used today.

  • Round Robin Charts

Students break out into small groups and are given a blank chart and writing utensils. In these groups, everyone answers an open-ended question about the current lesson. Beyond the question, students can also add any relevant knowledge they have about the topic to their chart. These charts then rotate from group to group, with each group adding their input. Once everyone has written on every chart, the class regroups and discusses the responses. 

  • Strategic Questioning

This formative assessment style is quite flexible and can be used in many different settings. You can ask individuals, groups, or the whole class high-level, open-ended questions that start with “why” or “how.” These questions have a two-fold purpose — to gauge how well students are grasping the lesson at hand and to spark a discussion about the topic. 

  • Three-Way Summaries

These written summaries of a lesson or subject ask students to complete three separate write-ups of varying lengths: short (10-15 words), medium (30-50 words), and long (75-100). These different lengths test students’ ability to condense everything they’ve learned into a concise statement, or elaborate with more detail. This will demonstrate to you, the teacher, just how much they have learned, and it will also identify any learning gaps. 

  • Think-Pair-Share

Think-pair-share asks students to write down their answers to a question posed by the teacher. When they’re done, they break off into pairs and share their answers and discuss. You can then move around the room, dropping in on discussions and getting an idea of how well students are understanding.

  • 3-2-1 Countdown

This formative assessment tool can be written or oral and asks students to respond to three very simple prompts: Name three things you didn’t know before, name two things that surprised you about this topic, and name one you want to start doing with what you’ve learned. The exact questions are flexible and can be tailored to whatever unit or lesson you are teaching.

  • Classroom Polls

This is a great participation tool to use mid-lesson. At any point, pose a poll question to students and ask them to respond by raising their hand. If you have the capability, you can also use online polling platforms and let students submit their answers on their Chromebooks, tablets, or other devices.

  • Exit/Admission Tickets

Exit and admission tickets are quick written exercises that assess a student’s comprehension of a single day’s lesson. As the name suggests, exit tickets are short written summaries of what students learned in class that day, while admission tickets can be performed as short homework assignments that are handed in as students arrive to class.

  • One-Minute Papers

This quick, formative assessment tool is most useful at the end of the day to get a complete picture of the classes’ learning that day. Put one minute on the clock and pose a question to students about the primary subject for the day. Typical questions might be:

  • What was the main point?
  • What questions do you still have?
  • What was the most surprising thing you learned?
  • What was the most confusing aspect and why?
  • Creative Extension Projects

These types of assessments are likely already part of your evaluation strategy and include projects like posters and collage, skit performances, dioramas, keynote presentations, and more. Formative assessments like these allow students to use more creative parts of their skillset to demonstrate their understanding and comprehension and can be an opportunity for individual or group work.

Dipsticks — named after the quick and easy tool we use to check our car’s oil levels — refer to a number of fast, formative assessment tools. These are most effective immediately after giving students feedback and allowing them to practice said skills. Many of the assessments on this list fall into the dipstick categories, but additional options include writing a letter explaining the concepts covered or drawing a sketch to visually represent the topic. 

  • Quiz-Like Games and Polls

A majority of students enjoy games of some kind, and incorporating games that test a student’s recall and subject aptitude are a great way to make formative assessment more fun. These could be Jeopardy-like games that you can tailor around a specific topic, or even an online platform that leverages your own lessons. But no matter what game you choose, these are often a big hit with students.

  • Interview-Based Assessments

Interview-based assessments are a great way to get first-hand insight into student comprehension of a subject. You can break out into one-on-one sessions with students, or allow them to conduct interviews in small groups. These should be quick, casual conversations that go over the biggest takeaways from your lesson. If you want to provide structure to student conversations, let them try the TAG feedback method — tell your peer something they did well, ask a thoughtful question, and give a positive suggestion.

  • Self Assessment

Allow students to take the rubric you use to perform a self assessment of their knowledge or understanding of a topic. Not only will it allow them to reflect on their own work, but it will also very clearly demonstrate the gaps they need filled in. Self assessments should also allow students to highlight where they feel their strengths are so the feedback isn’t entirely negative.

  • Participation Cards

Participation cards are a great tool you can use on-the-fly in the middle of a lesson to get a quick read on the entire classes’ level of understanding. Give each student three participation cards — “I agree,” “I disagree,” and “I don’t know how to respond” — and pose questions that they can then respond to with those cards. This will give you a quick gauge of what concepts need more coverage.

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formative assessment discussion

List of Formative Assessment Resources

There are many, many online formative assessment resources available to teachers. Here are just a few of the most widely-used and highly recommended formative assessment sites available.

  • Arizona State Dept of Education

FAQs About Formative Assessment

The following frequently asked questions were sourced from the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD), a leading education professional organization of more than 100,000 superintendents, principals, teachers, and advocates.  

Is formative assessment something new?

No and yes. The concept of measuring a student’s comprehension during lessons has existed for centuries. However, the concept of formative assessment as we understand it didn’t appear until approximately 40 years ago, and has progressively expanded into what it is today.

What makes something a formative assessment?

ASCD characterized formative assessment as “a way for teachers and students to gather evidence of learning, engage students in assessment, and use data to improve teaching and learning.” Their definition continues, “when you use an assessment instrument— a test, a quiz, an essay, or any other kind of classroom activity—analytically and diagnostically to measure the process of learning and then, in turn, to inform yourself or your students of progress and guide further learning, you are engaging in formative assessment. If you were to use the same instrument for the sole purpose of gathering data to report to a district or state or to determine a final grade, you would be engaging in summative assessment.”

Does formative assessment work in all content areas?

Absolutely, and it works across all grade levels. Nearly any content area — language arts, math, science, humanities, and even the arts or physical education — can utilize formative assessment in a positive way.

How can formative assessment support the curriculum?

Formative assessment supports curricula by providing real-time feedback on students’ knowledge levels and comprehension of the subject at hand. When teachers regularly utilize formative assessment tools, they can find gaps in student learning and customize lessons to fill those gaps. After term is over, teachers can use this feedback to reshape their curricula.

How can formative assessment be used to establish instructional priorities?

Because formative assessment supports curriculum development and updates, it thereby influences instructional priorities. Through student feedback and formative assessment, teachers are able to gather data about which instructional methods are most (and least) successful. This “data-driven” instruction should yield more positive learning outcomes for students.

Can formative assessment close achievement gaps?

Formative assessment is ideal because it identifies gaps in student knowledge while they’re learning. This allows teachers to make adjustments to close these gaps and help students more successfully master a new skill or topic.

How can I help my students understand formative assessment?

Formative assessment should be framed as a supportive learning tool; it’s a very different tactic than summative assessment strategies. To help students understand this new evaluation style, make sure you utilize it from the first day in the classroom. Introduce a small number of strategies and use them repeatedly so students become familiar with them. Eventually, these formative assessments will become second nature to teachers and students.

Before you tackle formative assessment, or any new teaching strategy for that matter, consider taking a continuing education course. At the University of San Diego School of Professional and Continuing Education, we offer over 500 courses for educators that can be completed entirely online, and many at your own pace. So no matter what your interests are, you can surely find a course — or even a certificate — that suits your needs.

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17.3: How can classroom discussions be used for assessment?

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  • Page ID 87689

  • Jennfer Kidd, Jamie Kaufman, Peter Baker, Patrick O'Shea, Dwight Allen, & Old Dominion U students
  • Old Dominion University

By Morgan Conley

Learning Objectives

  • Readers will be able to define Classroom Discussion and recognize which type of Assessment it falls under.
  • Readers will be able to summarize the benefits and limitations to using Classroom Discussions for Assessment purposes.

Using Classroom Discussion For Assessment

By incorporating classroom discussion in regular lesson plans, teachers can assess their students based on personal communication and knowledge of the subject matter. This is a form of formative assessment that takes place during the learning process to help the teacher and student understand the discussed information. Class discussion should be used together with other forms of assessment such as written response, selected response, and performance assessment in order to fully assess students. By presenting a question to a class of students, a teacher can open the classroom for discussion and mediate while the students come up with their own conclusions. “The best discussions occur in classrooms in which the teacher models discussion by being a discussant rather than the originator of all ideas” (Dixon, 2000). Not only raw knowledge can be expressed within these discussions; opinions, thoughts, and questions can be spoken freely with regard to the subject being discussed. Students even respond to others, answer each other’s questions, and present new questions or thoughts based on others responses. Students can share their own experiences pertaining to the discussed topic, which can help others learn because they are given clearer and more practical examples.

“Nine tenths of education is encouragement.” -Anatole France

Example & Explanation

An example of this would be a high school art teacher mediating a weekly artwork critique of his or her students’ artwork. The teacher can assess not only the artwork, but also each students thoughts about the artwork based on information presented in class. After the students post each of their works at the front of the class, the teacher goes through each piece and opens a class discussion by asking the students what they like and dislike about the artworks. Other matters and questions can be addressed also. For instance, what elements of art were used? What is the most effective part of this piece of work? What could be changed to make the piece stronger? By engaging each student into the discussion the students are applying the information they have been taught in order to support their own opinions and thoughts. Students may also respond to each others comments by adding to or questioning what was said in response.

Sample Criteria Used To Assess Classroom Discussion

  • Does the student stay on topic?
  • Does the student show understanding by using subject matter vocabulary appropriately?
  • Does the student use concepts and vocabulary learned in the classroom to add weight to his/her opinions and ideas?
  • Does the student contribute his/her ideas and/or build upon the ideas of others?
  • Is the student respectful to others with respect to differences in opinion?
  • Does the student provide constructive criticism to others regarding their thoughts, comments, or work?

“All scholarship, like all science, is an ongoing, open-ended discussion in which all conclusions are tentative forever, the principal value and charm of the game being the discovery of the totally unexpected.”-Hugh W. Nibley

Benefits Of Using Class Discussion

There are numerous benefits to effective class discussion being used for assessment. Number one being it is simply more interesting, fun, and interactive than simply listening to a teacher lecture or by taking a written test in order to assess knowledge of a subject matter. Classroom discussions encourage the practice of social skills and informal oral communication. This is a much-needed skill later in life. Class discussions encourage learning through active participation, comprehension and listening. Even those students who are less inclined to speak up, benefit from class discussions. For these student, the teacher can ask them questions about their own thoughts or to reword what someone else has already said. Class discussions force students to think, solve problems, listen to others, and even analyze other students ideas. This more informal type of assessment can be given in the form of a class participation grade for instance. Students learn to exercise the use of cognitive skills and furthermore, they back up their thoughts with evidence from past in class teachings. Students feel a stronger sense of confidence because they get to say what they think, instead of being told, this is what you should think. Because the teacher acts as a peer listener, responder, questioner, instead of a lecturer, students feel more in control of their learning and in turn become more motivated.

Limitations Of Using Class Discussion

Though there are many benefits, there are also some limitations to using classroom discussions for assessment. For example, this type of assessment is more suited for higher grade levels where students have the mental capacity to participate in a classroom discussion. Other types of assessment must be used in combination with this type of personal communication assessment in order to thoroughly assess a student’s knowledge and application. Classroom discussion alone is not a good way to thoroughly assess students. Then there is the argument that classroom discussion may not be the best way to evaluate all students. What about the shy, introverted students? In a study done in 2008, while comparing students written responses to that of the same students classroom discussion responses, the study proved that written responses were more thorough and not fully manifested within the environment of classroom discussions (Furtak, Erin Marie; Ruiz-Primo, Maria Araceli, 2008). This statement makes a lot of sense when one considers their own writings. People tend to be more descriptive, logical, and meticulous when writing because they most usually think things through thoroughly and write several drafts before the final draft is complete. Whereas, within a class discussion there is no intense brainstorming, outlining, and drafting over the course of several days. You have minutes at best to think about the topic, form an opinion, and speak your mind. Because of this, students tend to use bias, assumption, and judgement in order to form opinions. But is this such a bad thing? Or does this only make classroom discussions more effective when hearing and discussing the opposing views and diverse perspectives of others?

Exercise \(\PageIndex{1}\)

(1) What Form of Assessment does Classroom Discussion fall under?

A. Written Response

B. Performance Assessment

C. Selected Answer Response

D. Personal Communication

(2) Which of the following BEST describes Classroom Discussion?

A. Formal Assessment

C. Formative Assessment

D. Summative Assessment

(3) Mrs. Williams is a Drawing teacher at a High School. She has all of her students post their latest assignment on the board at the front of the classroom. She then asks her students what they like and dislike about each piece or artwork. She also asks them to comment on what can be changed in order to make each piece stronger. What is this an example of?

B. Formal Assessment

C. Class Discussion

D. Selected Answer Response

(4) Which of the following answers BEST demonstrates Classroom Discussion?

A. An oral presentation by a student about their favorite artist.

B. A teacher begins class by asking his/her students "What is Art?" and various students respond with their opinions.

C. A classroom is broken up into groups of 4 students in order to discuss their group project.

D. A teacher begins class by lecturing while using a Powerpoint presentation.

Dixon, Felicia A. 2000. The Discussion Examination: Making Assessment Match Instructional Strategy. Roeper Review 23 no2 104-8 D

Furtak, Erin Marie; Ruiz-Primo, Maria Araceli. 2008. Science Education v. 92 no. 5 (September 2008) p. 799-824.

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Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence

Formative assessments.

Nicole Messier, CATE Instructional Designer February 4th, 2022

WHAT? Heading link Copy link

Formative assessments occur before, during, and after a class session and data collected is used to inform improvements to teaching practices and/or student learning and engagement.

  • Formative assessments are beneficial to instructors by helping them to understand students’ prior knowledge and skills, students’ current level of engagement with the course materials, and how to support students in their progression to achieve the learning objectives.
  • Formative assessments are beneficial to students by providing them with immediate feedback on their learning as well as opportunities to practice metacognition, which is an awareness of one’s own knowledge and thinking processes as well as an ability to self-monitor one’s learning path (e.g., self-assessment of learning) and adapt or make changes to one’s learning behaviors (e.g., goal setting).

Formative assessments can be viewed through two broad assessment strategies: assessments for learning and assessments as learning.

  • Assessment for learning (AfL) provides the instructor an opportunity to adapt their teaching practices to support current students’ needs through the collection of data as well as provide practice, feedback, and interaction with the students.
  • Assessment as learning (AaL) provides student ownership of learning by utilizing evidence-based learning strategies, promoting self-regulation, and providing opportunities for reflective learning.

Formative Assessment

Want to learn more about these assessment strategies? Please visit the Resources Section – CATE website to review resources, teaching guides, and more.

Non-Graded Formative Assessments (AfL & AaL) Heading link Copy link

Non-graded formative assessments (afl & aal).

Non-graded formative assessments can be used to examine current students’ learning and provide an opportunity for students to self-check their learning.

  • Before class, questions can provide students with an opportunity to self-assess their learning as well as provide instructors with information for adapting their instruction.
  • During class, questions can provide a platform for discussion, interaction, and feedback.
  • After class, questions can provide students with opportunities to reflect, self-assess, and use retrieval practice .
  • Questions to gauge understanding of content in the video.
  • Think-pair-share – asking students to turn to their neighbor in class or small breakout groups in an online discussion and share their thoughts, ideas, or answers to a topic or question.
  • Muddiest point – asking students to identify a topic or theme that is unclear, or that they do not have confidence in their knowledge yet.
  • Three-minute reflection – asking students to pause and reflect on what they have learned during class (e.g., shared in a survey tool like Google Form , or in a discussion tool like Acadly ).
  • Asynchronous online sharing and brainstorming using Blackboard discussion boards or EdTech tools like Jamboard or Padlet.

Polling and video questions can be designed as assessment for learning (AfL) by gathering data for instructors to adapt their lectures and learning activities to meet students where they are or to provide opportunities for students to reflect on their learning. In-class activities such as think-pair-share and muddiest point or asynchronous sharing can be designed as assessment as learning (AaL) by providing opportunities for students to self-assess their learning and progress.

Example 1 - Polling Questions Heading link Copy link

Example 1 - polling questions.

An instructor wants to determine if students understand what is being discussed during the lecture and decides to create an opportunity for students to reflect and self-assess. The instructor designs a Likert scale poll where students are asked to rank their understanding of concepts from 1 – extremely muddy (no understanding of the concept) to 5 – ready to move on (a clear understanding of the concept). Based on student responses the instructor decides to revisit a muddy concept in the next class as well as provides additional resources via the course site on the concept to support student learning.

The instructor also encourages students to revisit concepts that they scored a three or lower on and write down questions about the concepts to share before the next class. The instructor decides to continue using the poll and the collection of questions on important concepts in the upcoming units. The instructor will utilize these questions throughout the term to support student learning.

This formative assessment example demonstrates assessment for learning (Afl) and assessment as learning (AaL) by collecting data to adapt instruction as well as provide students with the opportunity to self-assess.

Polling questions can also be used to verify that pre-class work was completed, as a knowledge check while taking attendance, as a quick confirmation of understanding while lecturing, or as an exit poll before leaving class (on-campus or synchronous online).

Non-graded formative assessments can be adapted to provide extrinsic motivation by awarding students credit if they achieve a certain percentage of correct answers (e.g., students complete at least 70% of the questions correctly to receive full credit). This type of extrinsic motivation shifts the focus from the students’ ability to answer the questions correctly to promoting self-assessment, practice, and goal setting.

Graded Formative Assessments (AfL & AaL) Heading link Copy link

Graded formative assessments (afl & aal).

Just like non-graded formative assessments, graded formative assessments can be used to examine current students’ learning and provide an opportunity for students to gauge their learning. Graded formative assessments should provide students with opportunities to practice skills, apply knowledge, and self-assess their learning.

  • One-minute essay – asking students to write down their thoughts on a topic at the end of a lecture.
  • Concept map – asking students to create a diagram showing relationships between concepts.
  • Authentic assessments – an assessment that involves a real-world task or application of knowledge instead of a traditional paper.
  • Reflections, journals, self-assessment of previous work
  • Discussion forums – academic discussions focused on a topic or question.
  • Group work or peer review
  •  Video questions using EdTech tools like Panopto or Echo360 .

Formative assessments like in-class work, written assignments, discussion forums, and group work can be graded with a rubric to provide individualized feedback to students. Video questions using EdTech tools like Panopto or Echo360 and quizzes using Blackboard Tests, Pools, and Surveys can be automatically graded with immediate feedback provided to students.

Example 2 - Written Assignment Heading link Copy link

Example 2 - written assignment.

An instructor decides to create four formative written assessments to measure student learning and provide opportunities for students to self-assess and self-regulate their learning. These written assignments are designed to assess each of the learning objectives in the course. Students are required to find new evidence by performing research based on the aligned learning objective(s) in each assignment. In the first written assignment, students are provided with a rubric to self-assess their work and submit their self-assessment and work. The instructor provides personalized feedback using the rubric on their work and self-assessment. In the second and third written assignments, students are asked to submit their work and provide a review of their peers’ work using a rubric. The instructor provides feedback on the peer review only. In the fourth assignment, the students are asked to select one of the previous pieces of work and make revisions as well as write a reflection on the knowledge and skills that were developed by completing a self-assessment and two peer reviews.

This formative assessment example demonstrates the importance of feedback in improving student performance and learning. This example could come from a writing, research, or humanities course where students are expected to produce narrative, argumentative, persuasive, or analytical essays. These written assignments could also be in major coursework and be more authentic (involves a real-world task or application of knowledge instead of a traditional paper), for example, developing a memo, proposal, blog post, presentation, etc. 

Formative assessments are used to provide opportunities for practice, feedback, and interaction ensuring students are active learners, instead of passive recipients of the information. In an active learning environment, student engagement, motivation, and outcomes are improved through the implementation of formative assessments. Students participate in meaningful learning activities and assessments that promote self-regulation, provide practice, and reinforce skills in an active learning environment.

Want to learn more about active learning strategies? Please visit the  Resources Section – CATE website to review resources, teaching guides, and more.

WHY? Heading link Copy link

Why develop formative assessments in your course?

Since the late 90s, Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam have been challenging the view that summative assessment is the best way to measure learning and support student success. Black and Wiliam’s research on formative assessment and student achievement started the shift from a summative focus to a more balanced view of assessment for student success.

Studies have shown that students who participate in formative assessments have improved overall performance and higher scores than students who do not participate in the formative assessments (Robertson, 2019) .

Impact on Students Heading link Copy link

Impact on students.

Students who participate in formative assessments develop and improve several essential skills (Koka, 2017) including:

  • Communication skills
  • Collaboration skills
  • Problem-solving skills
  • Metacognition
  • Self-regulation skills

Student involvement, self-reflection, and open communication between faculty and students during formative assessments are vital to student success (Koka, 2017). Effective formative assessments include (Black, 2009):

  • “Clarifying and sharing learning intentions and criteria for success,
  • Engineering effective classroom discussions and other learning tasks that elicit evidence of student understanding,
  • Providing feedback that moves students forward,
  • Activating students as instructional resources for one another,
  • Activating students as the owners of their own learning.”

Use of EdTech Tools Heading link Copy link

Use of edtech tools.

Studies have shown that using EdTech tools for formative assessments improves the immediacy of scores and feedback to students. Student wait time and faculty workload are dramatically reduced by the utilization of EdTech tools (Robertson, 2019). The use of EdTech tools for formative assessments also improves student satisfaction, enjoyment, and engagement (Grier, 2021; Mdlalose, 2021). EdTech tools can be used for synchronous and asynchronous formative assessments; however, synchronous formative assessments can allow the instructor to clarify misconceptions and help foster more engagement during discussions to create a learning community (Mdlalose, 2021).

In a study and literature review by Robertson and Humphrey (2019), they determined elements needed for formative assessment tools to be effective, including timeliness of feedback, elaborative feedback from the instructor, personalized feedback for students, reusability (reusing existing questions or content), accessibility (does the use of the tool exclude some students), interface design (how easy it is to implement), interaction (does it improve the frequency of interactions between student and instructor), and cost (funded by the institution or personal expense). These elements should be taken into consideration as you determine which EdTech tool(s) to use for formative assessments.

Feedback & Formative Assessments Heading link Copy link

Feedback & formative assessments.

A critical component of any formative assessment is the timeliness of feedback. Studies have shown that it is the immediacy of feedback that is most beneficial to student learning (Robertson, 2019) . As you begin to design formative assessments or select an EdTech tool to develop a formative assessment, make sure to determine how you will provide feedback to students.

Reflect on the following questions regarding feedback and formative assessments:

  • How will you ensure that feedback to students is timely?
  • How will you design multiple opportunities for feedback interactions with you and/or among peers?
  • How will you distribute feedback interactions throughout the course?
  • How will you provide personalized feedback to students?

Want to learn more about grading and feedback? Please visit the Resources Section – CATE website to review resources, teaching guides, and more.

HOW? Heading link Copy link

How do you start designing formative assessments?

First, you can review your course outcomes and learning objectives to ensure alignment of the formative assessments developed. Formative assessments can help measure student achievement of learning objectives as well as provide students with actionable feedback and the instructor with data to make decisions on current teaching and instruction practices.

So how do you determine what type of formative assessment to design? Or the frequency and distribution of formative assessments in your course? Let’s dive into some of the elements that might impact your design decisions, including class size, discipline, modality, and EdTech tools .

Class Size Heading link Copy link

Formative assessments can be designed and implemented in any course size from small seminar courses to large lecture courses. The size of the class will influence the decisions that instructors make regarding the use of EdTech tools to deliver formative assessments.

Small Class Size

  • May allow for more formative assessments distributed throughout the course.
  • May allow for more immediacy of feedback and descriptive, personalized, or dialogic feedback from the instructor.

Large Class Size

  • May require instructors to utilize EdTech tools to deliver formative assessments that are distributed throughout the course.
  • May require instructors to utilize EdTech tools to deliver timely, consistent, and helpful feedback to students.

Discipline Heading link Copy link

Formative assessments can be implemented in any type of course or program. A few considerations when developing formative assessments:

  • To understand students’ prior knowledge and skills.
  • As learning for students to reflect and self-regulate their learning.
  • To measure achievement of learning objectives.
  • To collect data to make decisions about teaching and instruction.

In undergraduate general education coursework, instructors should consider using formative assessments to understand student goals and motivations for taking a course and how to support their goals (future learning and connection to future career) and sustain their engagement in a course that may not be directly or obviously related to the major program of study. In major coursework, instructors might want to consider using formative assessments to reinforce knowledge and practice skills needed for summative assessments and external accreditation or licensure exams.

Modality Heading link Copy link

The modality of your course will influence the planning and delivery of formative assessments. Formative assessments can be designed for both synchronous and asynchronous delivery for any course modality.

Synchronous formative assessments (during scheduled classes) can be administered in on-campus, online synchronous, hybrid, and synchronous distributed courses. For example, creating in-class polls or surveys using an EdTech tool like Acadly and   iClickers .

Asynchronous formative assessments (outside of scheduled classes) can be administered in any type of course; however, asynchronous formative assessments are vital for online asynchronous courses to measure and reinforce learning. For example, creating weekly or unit quizzes in Blackboard using the Tests, Pools, and Surveys to reinforce student learning of the content.

Formative Assessment Tools Heading link Copy link

Formative assessment tools.

EdTech tools can help to reduce faculty workload by providing a delivery system that reaches students before, during, and/or after class sessions

Below are EdTech tools that are available to UIC faculty to create and/or grade formative assessments for and as learning.

Video and Questions Tools Heading link Copy link

Video and questions tools.

  • VoiceThread

Asynchronous formative assessment tools like videos with questions can help you provide opportunities for students to self-assess learning, receive feedback, and practice.

Questions, Surveys, and Polling Tools

  •   iClickers
  • Blackboard surveys and quizzes
  • Google forms
  • Poll Everywhere

Question or polling tools can be administered synchronously to check understanding during a lecture in on-campus or online synchronous courses. Many of these tools can also be used asynchronously by providing a link in the course materials or announcements in the learning management system (LMS) – Blackboard .

Assessment Creation and Grading Tools

  • Blackboard assignments drop box and rubrics

Assignments and scoring rubrics can be created in Blackboard for students to practice skills, receive feedback, and make revisions. Formative assessments can be created within Gradescope, or you can score in-class work using AI technology to reduce grading time, provide consistency in grading, and give general as well as personalized feedback to students.

Want to learn more about these formative assessment tools? Visit the EdTech section on the CATE website to learn more.

GETTING STARTED Heading link Copy link

Getting started.

The following steps will support you as you examine current formative assessment practices through the lens of assessment for learning (AfL) and assessment as learning (AaL) and develop new or adapt existing formative assessments.

  • Consider creating an outline of the course and determine when a learning objective is covered and should be assessed.
  • To collect data for decision-making about teaching and instruction (AfL).
  • To provide students opportunities for practice and feedback (AfL and AaL).
  • To promote self-regulation and reflective learning by students (AaL).
  • To provide differentiation for students to improve individual learning and performance (AfL).
  • Format: in-class work, question(s), written assignment, etc.
  • Delivery: paper and pencil, Blackboard, EdTech tool, etc.
  • Feedback: general (how to improve performance), personalized (student-specific), etc.
  • Scoring: graded, non-graded, participation points, or extra credit.
  • The fourth step is to review data collected from formative assessment(s) and reflect on the implementation of the formative assessment(s) to inform continuous improvements for equitable student outcomes.

CITING THIS GUIDE Heading link Copy link

Citing this guide.

Messier, N. (2022). “Formative assessments.” Center for the Advancement of Teaching Excellence at the University of Illinois Chicago. Retrieved [today’s date] from https://teaching.uic.edu/resources/teaching-guides/assessment-grading-practices/formative-assessments/

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES Heading link Copy link

Additional resources.

Academic Planning Task Force. (2020). Guidelines for Assessment in Online Learning Environments .

Clifford, S. (2020). Eleven alternative assessments for a blended synchronous learning environment. Faculty Focus.

Crisp, E. (2020). Leveraging feedback experiences in online learning. EDUCAUSE

Dyer, K. (2019). 27 easy formative assessment strategies for gathering evidence of student learning. NWEA .

Gonzalez, J. (2020). 4 laws of learning (and how to follow them). Cult of Pedagogy .

Weinstein, Y., Sumeracki, M., Caviglioli, O. (n.d.). Six strategies for effective learning. The Learning Scientists .

Agarwal, P. (n.d.) Retrieval practice website

Hattie, J. (n.d.) Visible Learning website

Weinstein, Y., Sumeracki, M., Caviglioli, O. (n.d.). The Learning Scientists. 

Wiliam, D. (n.d.) Dylan Wiliam’s website

REFERENCES Heading link Copy link

Black, P., Wiliam, D. (2009). Developing the theory of formative assessment. Educational Assessment Evaluation and Accountability. 21. 5-31. 10.1007/s11092-008-9068-5.

Earl, L.M., Katz, S. (2006). Rethinking classroom assessment with purpose in mind – Assessment for learning, assessment as learning, assessment of learning. Winnipeg, Manitoba: Crown in Right of Manitoba .

Grier, D., Lindt, S., Miller, S. (2021). Formative assessment with game-based technology. International Journal of Technology in Education and Science . 5. 193-202. 10.46328/ijtes.97.

Koka, R., Jurane-Bremane, A., Koke, T. (2017). Formative assessment in higher education: From theory to practice. European Journal of Social Sciences Education and Research . 9. 28. 10.26417/ejser.v9i1.p28-34.

Mdlalose, N., Ramaila, S., Ramnarain, U. (2021). Using Kahoot! As a formative assessment tool in science teacher education. International Journal of Higher Education . 11. 43-51. 10.5430/ijhe.v11n2p43.

Robertson, S., Humphrey, S., Steele, J. (2019). Using technology tools for formative assessments . Journal of Educators Online . Volume 16, Issue 2.

Weinstein, Y., Sumeracki, M., Caviglioli, O. (2019). Understanding how we learn – A visual guide. Routledge .

  • BookWidgets Teacher Blog

formative assessment discussion

The ultimate formative assessment guide for teachers - Classroom tools, tips, and examples

formative assessment discussion

Formative assessment is gaining importance in our classrooms. Evaluation is not just about a final grade anymore: it’s about pushing your students to get better learning outcomes; it’s about feedback, and growing.

Creating an effective teaching environment with formative assessment techniques and tools is important. In this formative evaluation blog post guide for teachers, I’ll show you everything you need to know about this topic.

This guide is divided into several chapters. Just click on the link below to jump to parts that interest you, or, if you’re new to formative assessment, just read everything. 👀

What is formative assessment?

  • The differences between formative and summative assessment
  • Types & examples of formative assessments
  • Formative assessment tools

Formative assessment tips for teachers

How to give formative feedback.

What is formative assessment

The definition of formative assessment (or formative evaluation) is very clear: Formative assessment is an ongoing process of collecting information on the outcomes, strengths, and weaknesses of your students at any point in their learning process.

Teachers use this information to provide ongoing feedback to students when they are still learning. Feedback should be actionable, so students can use it to improve their learning.

The most important characteristic of formative assessment is that there are no grades! You don’t need to put a mark on a student to measure his capabilities.

The differences between formative and summative assessment

The difference between formative and summative assessment

To show the differences between formative and summative evaluation, we’ve created a clear infographic for you.

Of course, I’ll spill the beans again, here.

Whereas the definition of formative assessment clearly states that it’s an ongoing process of collecting student information and providing feedback, summative assessment is used to evaluate students’ learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.

  • Difference 1: When does the assessment take place in a students’ learning process? That’s the first, and biggest difference between the two evaluation strategies. As you already know now, formative assessment is an ongoing activity. The evaluation takes place during the learning process. Not just one time, but several times. A summative evaluation takes place after the learning process when a course or unit is completed.
  • Difference 2: What’s the information you get from your students’ learning process? With formative assessment, you try to figure out whether a student’s doing well or needs help by monitoring the learning process. When you use summative assessments, you assign grades. The grades tell you whether the student achieved the learning goal or not.
  • Difference 3: What’s the purpose of both evaluation strategies? For formative assessment, the purpose is to improve students’ learning outcomes. For summative assessment, the purpose is to evaluate students’ achievements. In other words: do you want your students to be the best at something, or do you want your students to do better than before each time over and over again?
  • Difference 4: What’s the size of the evaluation packages? Formative assessment evaluates your students’ knowledge of small content areas. For example, 3 formative evaluations of 1 chapter. Summative assessment asks students to test their knowledge of complete chapters or content areas. For example, just 1 evaluation at the end of a chapter. The lesson material package is much larger now.
  • Difference 5: What’s the nature of the assessment? Formative assessment considers evaluation as a process. This way, the teacher can see a student grow and steer the student in an upwards direction. With summative assessment, it’s harder for you to guide the student in the right direction. The evaluation is already done. That’s why summative assessments or evaluations are considered to be more of a “product”.

You can also take a look at this page to learn more about using BookWidgets for formative and summative assessments.

types and examples of formative assessments

Types and examples of formative assessments

There are many methods to formatively evaluate your students. I’ll sum up a few types, including a digital example of formative assessment.

As this is a technology blog for teachers, I will focus a bit more on the digital ways of formative evaluation. You’ll see that for every traditional method, there’s a digital one too, providing the teacher with even more useful statistics in your students’ learning processes.

You can find and adapt all the digital formative assessment examples in this BookWidgets group folder .

1. Exit Tickets

formative assessment discussion

An exit ticket or exit slip is a sheet of paper or a digital activity with questions that each student answers individually at the end of the lesson.

The questions can be about the lesson content (what they liked about it, what they remember) , or about how they felt after the lesson. Exit slips will give you the information you need to help your students improve, and to help you understand how they feel at that exact moment.

There are hundreds of different exit slip types, which makes it a very strong formative assessment tool for all classes and all teachers.

Exit Ticket Example

We’ve created an exit ticket guide with over 60 digital, ready-to-use exit tickets for you to use immediately.

Check out the example below: Exit in 3, 2, 1

Formative assessment - exit slip

This exit ticket is created with BookWidgets, which also has a reporting dashboard for teachers. Here, you’ll see all the submitted results and you can quickly get the information you need, and provide feedback where needed.

2. Self-assessments

formative assessment discussion

It will take practice and guidance to help the students understand the importance of a thorough self-evaluation.

Self-assessment example

There are many self-assessment strategies. Exit slips are one of them. Take a look at the list with exit tickets above. You’ll certainly find some good ones. Also, check out this post with some creative self-assessment ideas .

Here’s my favorite self-assessment example: The Traffic Light

Formative assessment - self assessment

Students have to reflect on the task and indicate where they’re at. Do they understand everything? Do they still need help? Are they stuck or completely disoriented? They have to indicate and color the traffic light green, orange or red. They also have to indicate why they choose that color.

3. Worksheets and quizzes

formative assessment discussion

You can use, for example, the BookWidgets worksheet or quiz activity. With over 30 different question types, the possibility to add multimedia, and set up different scoring options, this is the ultimate formative evaluation activity you’ll be able to build.

Some unique formative assessment settings in the BookWidgets Worksheet or Quiz are:

  • Immediately show students the correct answers when the activity is finished: this way, students know what they have correct and where they need practicing for improvement.
  • Immediately color correct student answers green: students can keep trying and dig deeper in their brain to change the other answers to green as well. Instant feedback can be quite motivating for some learners.
  • Enter automatic feedback based on your students’ answers: students with a different outcome will get different feedback, adapted to where they are in their learning process.
  • Return student results, solely with your personalized feedback, without grades: students receive personalized feedback are able to try again keeping the timely feedback in mind.
  • Allow students to edit their answers: students can change their answers to the questions, based upon the automatic or personalized teacher feedback. This effective formative assessment technique may lead to improved learning outcomes.
  • Use LIVE activity while students are working on a worksheet or quiz: Know the exact moment when a student begins to struggle or needs support. This is also a great way to see which students are successful and provide enrichment opportunities or challenges to enhance engagement.
  • Provide a rationale to a response which is revealed along with the correct response after each question when your students go through the questions one by one: Rationale feedback allows learners to build knowledge sequentially in the learning process.

Digital formative worksheet example

Teachers have so many evaluation options in BookWidgets. This example utilizes the automatic feedback setting. Give it a try yourself to see how it works and what this can mean for your classroom. First, complete this worksheet really badly. Make some mistakes and click on “show score”. Now, read your feedback and edit your answers. Try to do better. What’s your feedback message now?

Formative assessment - Automatic feedback worksheet

Digital formative Quiz example

I have another one for you here, with different settings. This is a history quiz where students have to go through the questions one by one. After each question, they also get the right explanation. Go take a look! 👇

Formative assessment - Explanation in a formative quiz

4. Educational games

formative assessment discussion

Students are often more motivated when the teacher says the magical words “complete this crossword puzzle”. Games can also be great for assessing prior knowledge or as an opening lesson reflection.

Digital formative crossword puzzle example

This crossword puzzle is also a retrieval practice strategy, where students have to summon their knowledge about the lesson again. They can complete it, see the results and then submit to the teacher. Go ahead and give it a try 👇

Formative assessment - Formative crossword riddle

The teacher reviews the results and provides written feedback as needed. Finally, the teacher returns the feedback to the student.

Digital formative Pair Matching example

A pair matching game is solely for practicing, but feedback can be added to motivate and encourage students. And that’s what formative assessment is all about. In this example, students need to match the pairs, and after finishing they receive written and audio feedback from the teacher. The feedback could also be a question, asking your students to reflect on the exercise like in the example below. Go take a look!

Formative assessment - Formative pair matching exercise

These Crossword Puzzle and Matching pairs activities were created using BookWidgets.

5. Pop quizzes

formative assessment discussion

Digital pop quiz example

Take a look and go through the quiz. In the end, students have to submit their answers to the teacher and also get the right answers to see how they did.

Formative assessment - Formative pop quiz

Since your students have to submit this pop-quiz, you can view the results. Below you can see a snapshot of the reporting data of this BookWidgets quiz. It will show you which questions are hard to solve for the complete class. Use this to get your students back on track for the questions they clearly didn’t understand.

Formative assessment - Formative pop quiz statistics

6. Diagnostic tests

formative assessment discussion

You can use a diagnostic assessment to discover diverse learners’ needs. It allows you to see data on struggling learners as well as those who will benefit from increased challenges in learning. It is after the diagnostic assessment that differentiated teaching and learning begins.

Diagnostic test example

Here are two diagnostic test examples for teachers of English as a Second Language (ESL). Both are designed to provide the teacher an understanding of students listening and reading comprehension skills.

Diagnostic test example of listening skills

Formative assessment - Formative diagnostic test

Diagnostic test example of reading comprehension

Formative assessment - Formative diagnostic test

Ines Neefs , an English teacher in Belgium, created these BookWidgets diagnostic tests.

7. Journals an portfolios

formative assessment discussion

OR, this can be done differently. Here, a portfolio is used for daily self-reflection allowing opportunities for student to stay on task. Self-reflection allows students time to think about their thinking and learning leading to growth. Students should submit reflections to the teacher who in turn provides suggestions on how to try again, improve and even follow up with individual students.

Digital portfolio example

Portfolios can be websites your students build, or a combination of worksheets, collages, and more. For this example, I picked out a special one. It’s a self-assessment portfolio for students that are learning English. They have to keep track of what they learn, what went good, bad and how they are going to improve their learning outcome.

It’s an example created by Sandy Lapere , an English teacher in Belgium, and her team. She created this portfolio entirely with BookWidgets.

Formative assessment - Formative portfolio

8. Peer assessments

formative assessment discussion

Peer assessments have a few important advantages:

  • It encourages your students to reflect on their own learning progress and performance,
  • It helps students become autonomous learners,
  • It encourages students to be more responsible for their own learning,
  • It helps students develop their assessment and argument skills,
  • It helps students be more aware of their weaknesses and strengths;
  • It helps students learn more from each other.

Using their own and fellow students’ feedback, students can move forward with it and do better. Keep in mind that formative peer assessments aren’t about the grades, but about the feedback.

Peer assessment example

This is a simple but fun peer assessment. After an exercise, a performance or presentation, the fellow students need to give some tops and tips to the student in front of the class.

Formative assessment - Formative peer assessment

The teacher picks out 3 students to share their tips and tops out loud. The rest of the class send their results to the student in front of the class via e-mail. After sending it to their fellow students, they can delete their answers from the Widget and use it again for other fellow students.

9. Teacher Observation

formative assessment discussion

In your classroom, you should be able to see struggling students and students that need more challenges. Of course, this is very time-intensive, and you can overlook some things.

This is where technology can be helpful. A lot of apps allow you to track student progress while they are working on an assignment. This allows you to immediately swoop in when needed.

Live Widgets observation example

BookWidgets’ Live Widgets function allows you to do just that: follow students’ progress live while they are working on an assignment. The live widgets dashboard shows you how long it took for students to complete an assignment, how well they did on each question, and if they are stuck or not. You can open individual student work as well and see where things go wrong. This is your cue to help out a student and give instant feedback so they can move on.

Formative assessment tools for teachers

Formative assessment tools for teachers

In the arena of educational technology, you’ll see a lot of quiz and testing apps, but keep in mind that the focus must lie on providing your students with timely, meaningful feedback. The playing field for this type of apps narrows a bit, but there are still plenty of good fish in the sea to choose from.

Here is a list of 10 good formative assessment classroom tools for teachers. Of course, you can find many more formative evaluation tools for your classroom here .

1. BookWidgets

formative assessment discussion

BookWidgets has a library with over 40 different exercise templates (or widgets). You can create formative exercises like pair matching games or crossword puzzles, and formative assessments like worksheets and quizzes with over 30 different question types.

The BookWidgets Reporting Dashboard makes sure you get the right student statistics and feedback features to support your students’ learning. And, like I already said before, you can also follow student progress live, while your students are working on an assignment, which allows you to quickly steer students in the right direction.

2. EdPuzzle

formative assessment discussion

Add more value to videos in your lessons. They’re not just an introductory tool anymore. With EdPuzzle you can ask your students lots of questions during the video, so you can test their understanding right away and point out some important parts in the video.

Again, here you get some statistics to see how many times your students saw the video and how well they understood it. As a teacher, you use these statistics and address topics that are still a bit hard to understand for your students.

formative assessment discussion

You can even let parents join in on the conversation. They can see their children’s tasks and comment on them too.

4. Classkick

formative assessment discussion

Teachers provide personalized, real-time feedback and grading with an array of tools–directly on the canvas, in classkicks’ help center, or with pointed stickers. Students can even ask their peers for help anonymously.

5. Flipgrid

formative assessment discussion

Teachers can set up assignments where students need to respond with a video recording. Students can also respond to each other’s videos.

formative assessment discussion

The teacher asks a question, all your students have to answer it on their device and the results show up, on the screen, immediately.

Use this tool for anonymous surveys, brainstorm sessions, questions about the lesson material, Q&A sessions, and much more. Wooclap has a lot of fun live question formats.

7. Formative

formative assessment discussion

The feedback features are really handy (written, audio, video, …) and your students get a notification in case they look over the teachers’ feedback. As a teacher, you can also track student progress in real-time.

formative assessment discussion

All those slides make an amazing interactive presentation. Especially if you add activities like quizzes, open-ended questions, polls, draw questions, and others.

When your presentation is ready, your students can opt-in by entering a code in their Nearpod app or just click on the assigned link in Google Classroom.

You, as a teacher, are in charge of the presentation. when you switch to another slide, the presentation on your students’ devices will also switch to that slide.

When your students’ have to make a quiz or a poll, they can just do that on their screen, as it is a part of the presentation. The answers are gathered live! So you can see immediately what your students answered.

9. Peardeck

formative assessment discussion

You can even add interactive elements such as quiz questions and whiteboards. Every student can answer these in real-time on their own device. This truly engages students, and you’re sure that your students are participating as well.

The one thing I’m most excited about here is the Google Slides Add-on. Add Pear Deck activities to your google slides to make them even more interactive

formative assessment discussion

With Padlet you can create an online post-it board that you can share with any student or teacher you want. Just give them the unique Padlet link. Padlet allows you to insert ideas anonymously or with your name. It’s easy to use and very handy.

Whoever has the Padlet board opened on his device, can see what’s on it and what everyone is writing. Students just have to start adding little sticky notes online. They can see all the ideas gathered on the teacher board immediately. The teacher can allow other comments as well, which makes it the perfect tool for peer assessment.

formative assessment tips for teachers

As there are so many ways to do formative assessment, you might need some handy tips. Whatever formative assessment strategy you use in your classroom, these tips will help you out, and prevent you from making mistakes.

1. Actionable

formative assessment discussion

2. Educational technology

formative assessment discussion

3. Show the difficult parts

formative assessment discussion

4. QR-corner

formative assessment discussion

With BookWidgets, you can even bundle the exercises of the same topic into a WebQuest , creating just 1 QR-code for a complete set of extra exercises. You can also use a planner for this.

5. Video instructions

formative assessment discussion

6. Mastery learning

formative assessment discussion

7. Differentiate instructions

formative assessment discussion

Check out this BookWidgets blog post for 20 ways to give differentiated instructions . These instructions will give students the chance to learn at their own pace or according to their own needs, competencies, and interests. Differentiated instruction strategies make sure students don’t get left behind when the teacher moves forward.

How to give formative feedback

When you’re giving ongoing and regular feedback, you can speak of formative feedback. Formative feedback lies at the base for improvement and is crucial when it comes to formative assessment. Students are in need of ongoing information to identify their strengths and target areas so they know how to improve their learning process.

Make sure to read this comprehensive post about giving meaningful feedback . It will give you many good insights.

Giving meaningful feedback is not always easy. But there are a few feedback rules. Below, I give you a handy overview of the do’s and dont’s of giving feedback. These awesome tips are from Susan M. Brookhart. You can read more about it in her book: “ How to Give Effective Feedback to Your Students .”

It’s a wrap!

I hope you now have all the information about formative assessment you need. Let us know what tips you’ve just learned you’re certainly going to use in your classroom! Start the formative evaluation conversation, mention us on Twitter, @ibookwidgets , and make sure to share this post with fellow teachers.

Hooked on BookWidgets? Join our Teaching with BookWidgets Facebook community 💖. I’m Lucie Renard, and I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn or Twitter too!

Last but not least, don’t forget to create your first formative evaluation with Bookwidgets here. 👇

Create my first formative evaluation with BookWidgets

Join hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and get the best content on technology in education.

BookWidgets enables teachers to create fun and interactive lessons for tablets, smartphones, and computers.

formative assessment discussion

ICAS Assessments

Formative assessments: the ultimate guide for teachers

  • Categories Blog
  • Date February 14, 2024

teacher using formative assessments

K-12 education is a construction process where students’ skills and knowledge are gradually built up, with every preceding “block” essential to keep on building.

As a teacher, it’s your job to ensure that your students have the core knowledge they need to keep advancing through their education. You need a daily understanding of their current skills and knowledge so that you can accurately gauge their progression, and decide what to teach them next.

One of the most effective, proven ways to do this is with formative assessments (OECD, 2008). 1 They’re a crucial tool in your teaching kit, helping you to provide quality education to students.

Table of contents

  • What are formative assessments?
  • Evidence that formative assessment works
  • Formative assessment examples / types
  • Formative assessment strategies for your school and classroom

1. What are formative assessments?

Formative assessments are regular low-stakes tests that help you gauge students’ understanding. They are “dipsticks” where you can quickly check learning as you might quickly check the oil in your car, allowing you to adapt your teaching and fill knowledge gaps while learning is still taking place.

Quizzes are a common example of formative assessments. They’re quick to create, complete, and mark, and give you a good impression of students’ understanding of the content and their progress for the unit. You can see which questions and topics they are struggling with, re-teach them, and then re-test – a rapid feedback and improvement cycle that boosts student outcomes and moves them along their learning journeys.

formative assessment feedback cycle

You can see how this differs from summative assessments like end-of-year exams. These are one-off tests used to evaluate student understanding after learning has finished, with no opportunity to improve. Their purpose is to grade. But with formative assessments, getting the right answers isn’t important because that isn’t the objective. Instead, the purpose is to provide you with continuous, fast “readings” of student progress which you use to adapt your teaching and advance their learning. Summative assessments are to grade, and formative assessments are to direct .

As you can imagine, this sets entirely different tones for the two types of assessment. Summative tests can be high-stakes with real consequences that shape students’ future opportunities. This makes them understandably anxious, which can significantly affect their performance (Embse et al., 2018). 2 Formative assessments, on the other hand, are low-stakes, light-touch tests that are (ideally) designed to be fun and engaging, and to boost learning outcomes (OECD, 2008). 5 Formative assessments help to improve summative assessment scores/grades (and more importantly, their education), but this doesn’t work the other way around.

To make our position clear: both types of assessment have an important place in education. They just have different purposes and effects on students. If you’d like a more detailed comparison of these two types of assessment, please check out our article here .

How formative assessments help your teaching

male teacher high-fiving during formative assessment

“Formative assessment – while not a “silver bullet” that can solve all educational challenges – offers a powerful means for meeting goals for high-performance, high-equity of student outcomes, and for providing students with knowledge and skills for lifelong learning.” 1

– OECD

In essence, formative assessments help you answer three key questions:

  • Are students learning what they need to learn?
  • Are students learning at a steady pace?
  • What should be taught next?

The answers to these questions form an objective appraisal of your current teaching strategies and lesson plans, providing clues on what needs to change. This may include the following and more:

  • Change of content – formative assessments reveal student understanding, which includes any learning gaps or misconceptions they may have. With this information, you can adjust the content being taught to ensure they are learning what they need.
  • Refine learning intentions – when you have a strong understanding of your students’ knowledge and skills, you’re able to write more precise learning intentions in your lesson plans, and by extension, better plans overall that accurately address students’ needs.
  • Group students based on ability – formative assessments are usually given to entire classes, which reveals students’ both individually, and as a whole. If assessment results reveal distinct groupings of students based on their knowledge and skill, and you have the capacity to group them in your class and set unique work, that’s a much more inclusive way to teach and likely to result in better learning outcomes. More broadly, this information also helps you form separate support classes or Gifted and Talented classes.
  • Change frequency of assessment – if you’ve previously identified knowledge gaps, you’ll want to re-assess after learning to ensure they’re filled. While formative assessment should be a regular occurrence in your class, the frequency should change depending on the results and other feedback you get from students.

Formative assessments in action – a quick example

“Assessment is the bridge between teaching and learning. It’s only by assessment that you know what has been taught, has been learned.” 3

– Dylan Wiliam, formative assessment expert

To give you an example of formative assessments in action, let’s say you’re a Year 8 Science teacher starting a new term with students, and before proceeding with the content assigned to this term, you want to check their understanding to ensure they’ve mastered the prerequisite content, allowing you to correctly build on their knowledge.

As part of this term, students are extending their knowledge of biological sciences. So you ask them to take five minutes to create individual mind maps of everything they remember about cells – a brain dump of the content they have already been taught last term. Walking around the class, you can see maps that contain organelles, membranes, nuclei, and even little drawings of cell structures. Some students have filled their A4 sheet and others have barely touched it (mental note added). But overall, your students have covered the core concepts they learned last year.

To validate this information, you’d like them to elaborate on their mind maps to ensure they actually understand (rather than just remember) the concepts, so you write a few of the key ideas on the board and ask who would like to explain it. They seem to have a good grasp of membranes and nuclei, but even with plenty of hints, nobody can accurately describe what organelles do, or how the cells of plants and animals differ. You’ve identified two clear topics that need some refreshing, which you can either teach immediately or add to your next lesson plan.

These formative assessments may have taken no longer than 10 minutes. Of course, there needs to be a good balance between assessment and instruction, but that’s the beauty of formative assessments: they are quick and sharp and provide you with objective, real-world data that effectively directs your teaching. By incorporating formative assessments into your day-to-day teaching, you have vital feedback on student learning which you can use to identify and fill their knowledge gaps, build on their knowledge, and set them up for success.

Formative assessments help students become self-learners

class working together on formative assessments

Formative assessments have another effect on students that can improve their education and lives immeasurably: they help them become empowered self-learners (Clark, 2012). 3

This happens for two reasons:

They learn self-evaluation techniques

Many formative assessments have processes in which students assess their own work or the work of their peers. Rubrics are a good example. You can give students a marking rubric that allows them to assess their classmates’ abilities at reading aloud, as per below:

“By learning how to evaluate their own work, students develop the crucial meta-cognitive skills they need to progress by themselves.”

By using this rubric as a guide, they can score their classmates on volume, fluency, and clarity, and in the process, they also learn how to assess their own skills and pinpoint areas of weakness.

Informal debates are another example. You can create small groups of students and ask them to debate an issue in which they express their opinions, back them up with evidence, and listen to why their classmates agree or disagree. The conversations help them discover potential misconceptions or logical flaws, again teaching them (through modelling) how to evaluate such things by themselves.

By learning how to evaluate their own work, students develop the crucial meta-cognitive skills they need to progress by themselves. It’s giving them the proverbial fishing rod instead of a fish. They learn how to reflect, critique, review, and mark their own work, giving them a firm grip on their own learning and accelerating them to speeds far beyond what teachers can achieve by themselves. This leads to greater self-efficacy (Panadero et all., 2017) 4 and success.

They’re interactive and social

Formative assessments are highly varied, interactive tasks that students engage with during class. For most students, because the assessments are hands-on activities that require their attention, this makes them more interesting than standard instruction from the teacher. Students often become enthusiastically engaged in their learning, which creates a sense of agency and responsibility for their education. When combined with learning goals, this can be a powerful tool for improving outcomes.

Similarly, formative assessments can be co-operative social activities where students are encouraged to interact with their classmates and teachers. They might be having conversations with each other, validating their knowledge before and after learning, self-assessing using proven techniques, and many other activities (see our full list of assessment examples below) in which they are active and involved. As socially-driven creatures, this can turn your students’ learning from dull chores into genuinely fun experiences where they build friendships along the way.

2. Evidence that formative assessment works

student celebrating in front of laptop

“Teaching which incorporates formative assessment has helped to raise levels of student achievement, and has better enabled teachers to meet the needs of increasingly diverse student populations, helping to close gaps in equity of student outcomes.” 1

Formative assessments have been studied extensively, and show sweeping improvements for learning outcomes (OECD, 2008). 1

A comprehensive report on formative assessment by the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD), backed up by numerous studies, found the practice to be one of the most important interventions for promoting high [student] performance ever studied (OECD, 2008). 1 It’s the equivalent of taking students’ scores in an average performing country and lifting them into the top five best performing countries (Beaton et al., 1996, Black and Wiliam, 1998) 5,6 .

The OECD report shows that formative assessments:

  • Make education more equitable . They lift the performance of every single student, including those who are underachieving.
  • Improve school attendance . Formative assessments tend to be fun and engaging for students, which makes school much more enjoyable and reduces absence rates.
  • Help students retain what they’ve learned. Assessments tap into the “testing effect” – a phenomenon in which the act of testing also boosts learning. Trying to recall information from memory is a highly effective way to learn (Brown et al., 2014). 9
  • Help students become self-learners . They are more involved and engaged in the learning process itself, discovering the mechanics behind learning and self-evaluation and how they can do it themselves.
  • Help to clarify misconceptions. These can be immediately corrected during learning, before they are consolidated into long-term memories during sleep (Klinzing, Niethard and Born, 2019). 11

Aside from the OECD report, there are numerous studies where formative assessment has proven its worth. A 2021 meta-analysis of 32 studies found that formative assessments boosted learning outcomes considerably (Karaman, 2021). 11 For the core foundational skill of Writing, another meta-analysis of formative assessment experiments found feedback to be a crucial part of the process. When teachers and peers gave feedback, and students self-evaluated their own work, writing quality was enhanced (Graham et al., 2015). 7

Another study found formative assessment to have a positive influence on literacy as well as maths and the arts. Helping students to self-assess provided one of the biggest benefits, as did providing written feedback on quizzes (Lee et al., 2020). 8 Feedback has proven to be a crucial part of effective formative assessment, and we cover this in more detail below. For Science, high school biology teachers who completed a professional development program on formative assessment saw their abilities increase for key areas such as interpreting student ideas, eliciting questions and providing feedback (Furtak, et all., 2016). 7

Finally, in a random sample of 22 Swedish Year 4 Mathematics teachers, researchers asked them to participate in a professional development program on formative assessment. After implementing their knowledge in their respective classes, their students significantly outperformed others (Andersson, Palm, 2016). 10

We could go on. There’s so much evidence of the efficacy of formative assessment. It’s amazing to think that such drastic improvements can be made by introducing effective formative assessments into your classrooms (we talk more about effective strategies below).

3. Formative assessment examples / types and how they work

Formative assessments are extremely diverse. They range from generic to subject/content-specific, allowing you to assess knowledge and skills in a variety of ways, and cover the full breadth of K-12. You can pick and choose which formative assessments suit your students based on their age and the covered content.

Their variety and spontaneity can make learning much more fun for students of all ages. These are some of the more common formative assessment examples you’ll find in schools across the world.

sounds and syllables quiz formative assessment

Age group: all

Quizzes are one of the most popular types of formative assessment, and for good reason: they’re fun, quick to create and mark, and give you a great indication of students’ general knowledge, learning gaps and possible misconceptions for a topic. They can be given as:

  • Diagnostic pre-tests before starting a new unit
  • Mid-unit checkups to determine whether learning is going according to plan
  • Evaluative tests that check learning before the next unit starts
  • Start or end of lesson check-ups to quickly assess learning

Quizzes typically contain multiple-choice questions , which make them nice and quick to mark. But they can take other forms if needed. You can also incorporate directive feedback into each quiz’s results to show students what they might do to improve.

Discussion boards

discussion board formative assessment

With discussion boards, students write what they know about a topic on the whiteboard. This could be as a mind map, graffiti wall, or another format, with students writing short words or phrases, full sentences, or even drawing pictures. It’s a brain-dump of sorts that helps you understand students’ depth of knowledge for a topic, and any potential learning gaps or misconceptions you need to address.

brain dump mind map formative assessment

Brain dumps are the same as discussion boards but are completed on paper or screens, either individually or in small groups. Students write everything they know about a topic in the format they prefer, which gives you an idea of their knowledge for the topic.

Traffic light system

With the traffic light system, each student is given three coloured cards – one red, one orange and one green – which they need to hold up in response to a statement. Red is disagree, orange is unsure, and green is agree. You might ask them whether 10 times 10 is 200, whether day and night is created by the moon, or whether the word “running” is a verb.

When students hold their cards up, you get a visual gauge of how many students answered correctly. It’s another super-quick, fun formative assessment for younger students.

Questions / surveys

male teacher surveys questions class

These are the simplest formative test of all: you ask questions to the class and assess their answers on the spot. They’re a staple of teaching around the world because they give you an ultra-fast idea of what your students know about the content already taught, so that you can refresh their memories if needed. You’ll be able to gauge their knowledge from the numbers of hands raised and the quality of answers (keeping in mind the general shyness of that particular class).

Rubrics / self-evaluation

Age group: Years 3 to 10

When students learn how to assess their own work, they’re on the road to becoming self-learners who can develop a fully-fledged love of learning. Rubrics are a formative assessment that helps them on this path. They’re a simple marking criteria that students can apply to their own (or their classmates’) work to judge their performance, and what improvements they might need to make.

As already touched on previously, an example is the reading rubric shown below. Students can listen to their classmates read aloud, give them a score for each skill, and then discuss why they gave them afterwards. The rubric is one of many tools that students can use to self-evaluate and become enthusiastic independent learners.

kwl chart formative assessment

KWL charts are a formative assessment that prepare your students for what they’re going to learn, get them invested in their own learning, and help them evaluate whether learning was successful.

Three columns are drawn on the board in class, from left to right:

  • What I know
  • What I want to know
  • What I learned

For the content being taught in today’s class, students are invited to write about what they know about it, and what they want to know about it. They complete the “what I learned” third column at the end of class, showing them whether they achieved their desires/objectives. This is another simple, effective way for students to assess their own learning.

You can include an additional section if you wish – how will you learn it (which makes it KWHL). This encourages students to think about how to research and discover the information.

Think-Pair-Share

student working on think pair share formative assessment

Age group: Years 1 to 9

With Think-Pair-Share, students write down their responses to a question and then discuss their answers with a partner. You walk around the room and listen to their discussions, to gauge their level of understanding of the topic. Finally, they share their answers with the class, which encourages them to reflect on the accuracy and logic of their own.

See, Think, Wonder

formative assessment discussion

Age group: Years 1 to 5

See, Think, Wonder is a formative assessment that stimulates students’ curiosities and really gets them thinking about an image. They are given a photograph or picture and sheets with three columns that must be filled out:

  • See – they describe what they see using descriptive language
  • Think – they describe what they think is going on with the image
  • Wonder – they write anything they’re wondering about the image

The task shows you the quality of their writing, their interpretation skills, their creativity, the accuracy of their observations, and more. Once done they can discuss their answers with students at their table, which encourages teamwork, or read them to the entire class.

Thumbs up or down

students thumbs up or thumbs down

This is another quick and easy assessment that reveals general misconceptions. You offer a statement and ask them to give a thumbs up if they agree, and a thumbs down if they disagree. By judging the accuracy of their answers, you’ll know whether common misconceptions are present and resolve them if so.

For the statements, it can be a good idea to use any that your prior students have struggled with in the past.

Hot seat questioning

Hot seat questioning is an assessment that makes questions a little more fun. Anonymous questions are placed on a selection of seats, typically in front of class, and students are invited to select a seat, read the question aloud, and then try to answer. The rest of the class are encouraged to discuss the students’ answer and provide their own if appropriate.

The questions can vary in difficulty depending on the subject and year level. It can be an engaging, fun way to assess student learning and stimulate discussion.

Entry & exit slips

entry exit slips

Age group: Years 1 to 6

Entry and exit slips are a simple form of pre- and post-tests, helping you understand whether content was successfully learned. Students fill out an entry slip with a question like “How does heat transfer?” and then an exit slip with the same question. This helps them to compare their knowledge before and after the lesson, which can be extremely satisfying and motivating. You can also check their answers for accuracy once the lesson is over and discover learning gaps or misconceptions that need to be addressed.

One-minute papers

At the end of the lesson, students are given a minute to answer a question that summarises what has been learned. For example: how does hardware and software allow people to interact with computers?

After quickly reviewing their papers, you’ll have a sense of how well they’ve remembered and understood the content, and whether you need to go over it again in the next lesson.

The limited time given to complete this task can make it stressful for some students, which impairs its accuracy. You can relax every student by telling them they have a minute, but that they can also take some extra time if they need.

Muddiest point

female teacher helping student with muddiest point

With the muddiest point assessment, students are asked to write down what they were most confused about after a lecture or other activity. You can select random students to discuss their answers with the class, have them talk about their answers between themselves, or review their answers once the class is over. If you notice common confusions/misunderstandings, you’ll want to address them in a future lesson.

Informal debates

classroom debate formative assessment

Age group: Years 5 to 12

Informal debates between groups of two or more students can be a great way to gauge their understanding of a topic. You can assign each group member a position in the debate, ask them to present evidence of their viewpoints to each other, and have them respond in turn. It works best for more “subjective” subjects that can lack concrete explanations or viewpoints, like literature, the arts, or social sciences.

This assessment tool really taps into students higher-order thinking skills, with each side bringing their arguments, supportive reasoning and passion to the conversation.  

Anticipation guides

Age group: Years 3 to 9

Anticipation guides are a tool that help you discover misconceptions for students. You present them with a statement like “Products have minimal impact on the earth’s environment,” and ask them write down whether they agree with the statement before the lesson begins. Once the lesson is over, you ask them to respond to the same question.

Their answers will tell you whether they have absorbed your instruction, and can also vividly demonstrate the value of teaching to them – “in the past hour I’ve learned something new and important!”

students pulling scary faces drama

Kids love moving their bodies, and you can use this to your advantage by asking them to “act out” certain processes in class. For example, if you want to know whether they’ve understood how gas, liquids, and solids behave differently, you can clear a space and ask them to (safely) demonstrate how they might move if they were transformed into one of these states. Or you can ask them to form expressions for how a character might feel in a story.

This exercise is not only great fun (especially for younger children), it also communicates their understanding to you.

4. Formative assessment strategies for your school and classroom

Now that we’ve covered the what and why of formative assessment, it’s time to talk about some actual strategies that you can use to implement them at your school and execute them to a high standard.

Set up a formative assessment framework

“A framework will make your formative assessments structured, purposeful, frequent, and at less risk of being dropped in favour of ‘teaching to the tests’.”

Some teachers are pressured to achieve good grades on high-visibility summative assessments, and this can come at the cost of fewer formative assessments that actually improve student outcomes (OECD, 2008). 1

So it’s crucial to create a formative assessment framework that prioritises the tests, especially if they are regularly dropped in favour of summative testing. A framework will make your formative assessments structured, purposeful, frequent, and at less risk of being dropped in favour of “teaching to the tests,” especially if they are endorsed by the school leaders.

Thankfully, the OECD has completed extensive research on formative assessments , with real case studies on teachers who have successfully made them a part of their teaching and achieved strong learning outcomes for their students. These are some of their suggestions that can form the basis of your framework, adapted and summarised:

Establish a classroom culture that encourages interaction through formative assessments

students working on robot classroom culture

Interaction is a big part of formative assessment. Students may find themselves thrusting their thumbs in the air, holding up coloured paper, drawing mind maps, having debates and more. These hands-on, collaborative types of assessment are not only more engaging for students, but it’s showing them that learning can (and should) be fun – even for the teenagers!

Make formative assessments an integral part of your classroom culture. Factor them into your lesson plans and get every student involved. Demonstrate that the tasks themselves are important because they teach them to become more self-aware, more empathetic and cooperative with their classmates, more able to make decisions, and better equipped to assess their own work. Show them, over and over, that formative assessments are not necessarily about getting a top score or beating their classmates. They’re about carving out a path for your teaching while giving them the tools they need to become fully-fledged, self-learners. Get parents involved too and try to convince them of the value of formative assessment – it should be an easy sale!

There is no such thing as “failure” with formative assessments, and with every new one completed, students will start to realise this and become more confident and happier to take risks.

Create challenging learning goals for students and track their progress, together

Goal-setting is a long proven technique for achieving better outcomes, both inside and outside the classroom. Setting challenging goals has shown to improve task performance, boost work output, and regulate choices in favour of completing the goal (Locke et al., 1968). 12

In the context of formative assessments, goals should relate to mastery, not marks. Your students may create learning goals to improve their reading comprehension, to master their multiplication tables, or to run simple science experiments with clear predictions, conclusions and evaluations. With clear goals that have explicit, easy-to-understand success criteria, lessons can become more meaningful and students may find themselves more engaged in their learning – there’s a purpose and objective to what they’re doing. Rather than achieving an A+, it’s about becoming a more capable person. This can lead to greater intrinsic motivation, improved self-esteem, and a number of other benefits (OECD, 2008). 1

Work with your students to set learning goals that are personally meaningful to them. Have them print them off and stick them to their workbooks. For related lessons where learning goals are shared among students, ask them to quickly read their goals at the start of the lesson, and then when the lesson is over, get them to spend 30 seconds reflecting on their progress. Did they move a little closer? What might they do better next time? This is self-learning in action, and gives them the confidence and autonomy to become lifelong learners.

Use varied formative assessment methods to meet diverse student needs

Your students are all fantastically unique. Some thrive when asked to complete quizzes. Others enjoy reflecting on what they’ve learned. Some love going up to the board and writing or drawing what they know about something.

student looking at tablet in library

To cater to the various needs and preferences of your students, it pays to incorporate a variety of formative assessment methods into your day-to-day teaching. This not only makes things more fun for your students, it provides you with a broader, more accurate assessment of their skills and knowledge.

Involve students in the learning process

As previously discussed, one of the most incredible things about formative assessments is that they encourage students to become actively involved in their own education, teaching them self-learning strategies they can use to grow all by themselves. These “metacognitive” strategies are a fundamental soft skill that can make a big difference to their success at school and beyond.

Try to incorporate a good portion of formative assessments that teach students the value of learning and show them how to assess their own work. These include rubrics, KWL charts, entry/exit tickets and more.

Give feedback rather than marks

Marks are important to summative tests like exams, but when it comes to formative assessments, feedback is the name of the game. It’s essential for helping students self-learn. A mark is a solitary number that tells them almost nothing; high-quality feedback is rich, specific information that tells them where to go next. It can help students to feel more motivated, better equipped, and more confident, which can almost double their growth over the course of a year (Hattie and Temperley, 2007) 13 .

When offering feedback for formative assessments, try to ensure that it is:

  • Timely – imagine if a driving instructor only provided suggestions after you’d got out of the car? They’d be nowhere near as effective. Our short-term memories are exactly that – short – and we are much more capable of actioning feedback if it’s delivered immediately when the tasks are still fresh in our minds. Work with your students’ short-term memories, not against them.
  • Specific and constructive – what specifically did the student fail at, and how can they remedy the problem themselves? That’s what your feedback should focus on. Students need to know what they did wrong and what actionable steps they can take to fix it: key ingredients for self-learning. It may be that they can’t do this by themselves because they don’t know the content well enough, in which case it needs to be re-taught.
  • Motivational – starting feedback by acknowledging students’ correct answers can make them more receptive to fixing their mistakes / filling their learning gaps. By telling them they’ve done well for certain questions, it can motivate them to do well for every A pat on the back can do wonders! You can also highlight what they’ve improved on since their last assessment, helping them to see that they’re progressing towards their learning goals.
  • Where am I going?
  • How am I going?
  • Where to next?

female teacher gives feedback to male student

When providing formative assessment feedback to students, it can be based on four different things:

  • The activity – how well the task was understood or performed.
  • The learning process – what the student needs to do to complete the task.
  • Managing their learning – how the student might need to plan or self-monitor.
  • Qualities – personal qualities that the student shows, like an aptitude for arithmetic.

And finally, if providing praise as part of your feedback, it goes without saying that you should never focus on their intelligence or natural abilities. It creates a fixed mindset that can really hinder their learning. 14 Instead, try to praise their effort.

Teach students how to assess their own work

Self-assessment is a key part of self-learning – a process that can work like high-powered fertiliser for students’ growth. When students are taught how to self-assess, they better understand how their answers are related to their learning goals, they’re invited to reflect on their efforts, and most importantly, they can identify what they need to do to produce better quality work.

As their teacher, you use pre-defined success criteria to assess the accuracy of their work, and they can use the very same criteria to assess themselves and their peers. As you complete the different types of formative assessment, demonstrate how you use the templates, checklists, or rubrics to mark their work, and how it shapes the judgment of what is considered high-quality. Give them samples of exemplary work and explain why it’s so good. Show them, again and again, how you use the criteria to discover potential gaps in their learning and the actions that might be taken to fill them. By modelling your own assessment and feedback processes, you help them become their own teachers.

When they get better at this important skill, students can spend time marking, discussing, critiquing and demystifying their assessment results, blossoming into self-directed learners who can take ownership of their education. You’re showing them that self-assessment is a vital part of the learning process and providing them with the tools they need to achieve great things.

The NSW Government provide some more extensive examples of how to teach students self-assessment techniques , which we highly recommend reading.

Vary formative assessments to meet students’ diverse needs

Student diversity is one of the biggest challenges to providing great education, and this extends to formative assessment. With so many different learning styles, preferences, levels of progress and subject matter, you’ll need to select a variety of assessment types to suit their needs. A quiz might make sense for one subject and group of students, an informal debate for another, KWL charts for younger children, etc. It all comes down to what you think might work best for the group and the content, which takes time and patience to figure out.

Practice and experimentation is key. In time, you’ll be a formative assessment master.

Always test for misconceptions before starting a new unit

student with hand up testing misconceptions

Education is a series of building blocks, and if one of those blocks is the wrong size, it compromises the entire structure. Knowledge cannot be built upon if incorrect. If students have misunderstood how basic fractions work, they’re not going to be able to understand equivalent fractions later on.

Thankfully, formative assessments are ideal for diagnosing these kinds of misconceptions . Pretty much any formative assessment can be diagnostic. Whether you’re using surveys, hot seat questioning, or another type of assessment, you’ll quickly discover common misconceptions and remedy them before they can hamper students’ learning later on. And the best time to do this is before starting a new unit, when they’re about to learn fresh content. It’s the perfect time to repair those misshapen blocks of knowledge from the previous unit so you can confidently keep building.

Make students feel safe

Formative assessment can be engaging and highly interactive, so students need to participate for it to work. But this won’t happen unless they feel safe.

Creating a safe learning environment is a big topic, but here are some effective tips you can use to make students feel secure in your classroom, and coax each of them out of their shells:

  • Lay down ground rules – make it absolutely clear that there will be no laughing, teasing, or name calling in class, and that transgressions will be punished. These kinds of hurtful interactions can be burned into students’ memories and really hold them back. Make your class a judgment-free zone and enforce a strict zero-bullying policy.
  • Be trustworthy – consistently treat your students with kindness, respect and a “fair but firm” attitude, and you’ll quickly win their trust. They’ll feel much safer to participate when they know the authority in the room has their back. This is especially important for the students who are particularly withdrawn or emotional, and may have a turbulent life at home. Your classroom could become their precious safe place.
  • Explain the importance of mistakes – every mistake is an opportunity for the student to recognise the error, figure out where they went wrong, and do it right next time. There’s no growth without mistakes – they’re a sign that your students are pushing themselves!
  • Incorporate brief social-emotional activities – brief activities like daily greetings, checking in with emotions and gratitude lists can help your students express their emotions to their peers, build stronger empathy skills, and feel emotionally safe in your class.
  • Post their work around the class – most of us love to be celebrated for our achievements, and you can do this for your students by posting their great work on the classroom’s walls. It’s a visual reminder that they are skilled and capable.
  • Explain why you’re giving an assessment – for formative assessments that can feel high-stakes, like quizzes or one-minute papers, briefly explain why it’s important, and remind them that there are no consequences for wrong answers.
  • OECD/CERI, Assessment for Learning Formative Assessment , OECD
  • Nathaniel von der Embse, Dane Jester, Devlina Roy, James Post, 2018, Test anxiety effects, predictors, and correlates: A 30-year meta-analytic review , Journal of Affective Disorders
  • Ian Clark, 2012, Formative Assessment: Assessment Is for Self-regulated Learning , Educational Psychology Review
  • Ernesto Panadero, Anders Jonsson, Juan Botella, 2017, Effects of self-assessment on self-regulated learning and self-efficacy: Four meta-analyses , Educational Research Review
  • Beaton, A.E. et al. (1996), Mathematics Achievement in the Middle School Years, Boston College, Boston, MA.
  • Black P. and D. Wiliam (1998), Assessment and Classroom Learning, Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice
  • Steve Graham, Michael Hebert, and Karen R. Harris, Formative Assessment and Writing , The Elementary School Journal
  • Hansol Lee, Huy Q.Chung, Yu Zhang, Jamal Abedi, Mark Warschauer, 2020, The Effectiveness and Features of Formative Assessment in US K-12 Education: A Systematic Review , Applied Measurement in Education
  • Brown et al. (2014), Make It Stick, Belknap Press
  • Catarina Andersson, Torulf Palm, 2017, The impact of formative assessment on student achievement: A study of the effects of changes to classroom practice after a comprehensive professional development programme , Learning and Instruction , 49
  • Jens G. Klinzing, Niels Niethard, Jan Born, 2019, Mechanisms of systems memory consolidation during sleep , Nature Neuroscience
  • Edwin A. Locke, 1968, Toward a theory of task motivation and incentives , Organisational Behaviour and Human Performance
  • Hattie, J & Timperley, H, 2007, The Power of Feedback , Review of educational Research Vol. 77
  • Carol Dweck, 2006, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Random House

nardin hannah former teacher

Nardin is a former primary school teacher of 10 years. During her time as a teacher, she served as Head of Years for K-2, was a trained NAPLAN marker, and was part of the team that wrote the 2021 NSW English Syllabus 3-6. She is currently an assessment consultant for ICAS and Reach.

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Writing effective questions for formative assessment

Andy Chandler-Grevatt

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Taking this approach will get your students thinking about how they can improve

An image showing a teacher directing learning

Source: © Andrea Ebert/Ikon Images

It’s more than doing formative assessment, it’s about ‘being’ formative

I first became interested in the importance of classroom culture to successfully implement formative assessment when I was doing my doctorate in education. So, I want to introduce how to write and use questions more formatively so that they inform teaching and learning.

For me, it’s more than ‘doing’ formative assessment, it’s about ‘being’ formative, by creating a formative culture in your classroom. Formative values underpin everything that is done and said by teachers and learners in the formative classroom, although in real classrooms there is a blend of summative and formative approaches.

The benefits of formative assessment have been seen in classrooms globally over the past two decades. In particular, formative assessment has highlighted the power of effective feedback, led to improvements in our understanding of how feedback can affect motivation, and helped to harness independence in learners through the development of self-regulation .

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An audit to help you develop your formative practice as MS Word or pdf . Answer the questions to work out which practices you use and which you would like to develop.

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An audit to help you develop your formative practice from the Education in Chemistry website: rsc.li/2DVRFef

Different teachers have different values with regard to assessment based on their personal pedagogy and the culture of the school in which they work. So it is useful to reflect upon your values, decide what you want to change and then make those changes in your practice. Here are three examples of formative practices in the use of written questions.

Writing closed questions

Closed questions, often in the form of knowledge tests, are a common approach to assess how well learners know a particular topic. These tests are often written as a list of recall questions that require short one- or two-word answers. In this summative approach, questions need to be closed and unambiguous. For example, what is the chemical symbol for chlorine?

However, these questions can be used more formatively if these become a resource rather than a test. Learners take ownership of the process by self-testing until they feel confident before a summative test takes place.

In a formative culture, you can use questions to support self-regulation. When setting a learning activity — learn the symbols for the first 20 elements — also ask the students ‘how’ they might achieve this. For example, the question could be ‘How will you make sure that you have really remembered the first 20 elements?’ There could be a discussion about which strategies students might try: ‘look, cover, write’ method, regular retesting, mixing up the order, or making a game, such as ‘pairs’ with cards of the names and symbols.

A formative approach focuses on the self-regulation principles of planning, monitoring and evaluating. It also promotes effective ways to learn, such as retrieval practice .

Writing diagnostic questions

Diagnostic questions are intended to be used formatively; they ask a question that is often supported by a choice of answers. Depending on the choice made by a learner, a judgment and intervention can be made. Carefully construct your diagnostic questions to ascertain what a learner knows about a particular concept. The questions can take several forms:

  • Multiple choice questions – these are quick to answer and mark.
  • Concept cartoons – in which a problem is given alongside three or four plausible answers.
  • Pinch point multiple choice questions – whereby each answer leads to a specific intervention.

These questions can be difficult to write and often take a lot of research, trials and modifications to get right.

Using diagnostic questions as a summative test is possible, but it rather defeats the object. The follow-up from diagnostic questions focuses on the intervention and the learning. In a formative culture, teachers are more likely to explain the purpose of the activity. For example, a typical introduction to an activity might be: ‘This activity is to help you find out what you know and what you need to do more work on. Once you have done the task, based on the results, you can decide which improvement activity to do. At the end of the lesson, I want you to be able to tell me how you improved and what you did to make those improvements in your learning.’

This approach gives the learners some ownership over how they will address areas for improvement, values improvement by giving it time in the lesson, and emphasises what has been learned and how it has been learned (the process of learning).

Writing open-ended questions

Open questions are written to deliberately invite extended, thoughtful, detailed answers. They encourage learners to identify what they know, what they need to improve, and how to find out and learn deficits in knowledge and understanding.

Open questions, such as ‘What happens when a candle burns?’, often have supporting guidance like ‘Explain the physical and chemical processes that occur when a candle burns’ or a rubric to support the task. Examples of open-ended questions include the use of ‘grade-ladder tasks’ or threshold concept mastery tasks .

The structure of the lesson is often crucial to encourage a formative approach. The first part of the lesson is spent drafting the answer, a middle part reflecting on how to improve and the final part making those improvements. Yet, as with all teaching resources, it’s not what you do, it’s the way that you do it.

Developing a formative culture audit

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Series Formative Assessment Practices to Support Student Learning: Formative Assessment: Collaborative Discussions

Common core State Standards

  • ELA:  English Language Arts
  • SL:  Speaking and Listening Standards K-5
  • 4:  4th Grade
  • 1c:  Engage effectively in a range of collaborative discussions (one-on-one, in groups, and teacher-led) with diverse partners on grade 4 topics and texts, building on others'\x80\x99 ideas and expressing their own clearly. a. Come to discussions prepared, having read or studied required material; explicitly draw on that preparation and other information known about the topic to explore ideas under discussion. b. Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions and carry out assigned roles. c. Pose and respond to specific questions to clarify or follow up on information, and make comments that contribute to the discussion and link to the remarks of others. d. Review the key ideas expressed and explain their own ideas and understanding in light of the discussion.

Download Common Core State Standards (PDF 1.2 MB)

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Formative Assessment: Collaborative Discussions

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Discussion and Supporting Materials

  • Supporting Materials

Thought starters

  • How does Ms. Bouchard involve her students in establishing the learning goals and success criteria?
  • What observations does Ms. Bouchard make during the discussions?
  • How does Ms. Bouchard help the students assess their own learning?

43 Comments

Private message to Carolyn Cobbs

Carolyn Cobbs Jul 6, 2021 3:20pm

The teacher only used direct information and not over inserted things to disconnect their learning. The students was very confident in giving their answers in front of the class. The lesson well constructed well and connects all areas of the day lessons. The lesson plan made collaboration of understanding easy even for struggling students. Also made students reflect back as they move forward. Great way to keep students engaged throughout. 

Private message to Elizabeth Owonikoko

Elizabeth Owonikoko Jul 3, 2020 11:31am

I love how Ms. Bouchard first helped the students understand the concept, collaboration. She allowed the students to control the discussion while sure she corrects any misconception. She gave them some question that they worked together as a group, each contributing his/her idea using collaborative words. The student control the discussion while the teacher provides feedback where necessary. Ms. Bouchard walked around the class listening to the collaboration and pointing out that asking questions would help clarify ideas and better understand each other and connect with each other's idea. A llowing students to engage in a collaborative discussion helps them feel engaging and learning from each other. It allowed all the students to participate and make their ideas heard.

Private message to Wilma Bynum

Wilma Bynum Jun 16, 2020 5:34pm

Ms. Bouchard had a class project defining the word "collobrate".   She let them control the discussion and if they got off with the project, she had them to focus back.  Asking questions to each otherwas one way the class used. Building ideas make the class use collaborative ideas.  Four highlighted factors included: Clarity, Elcite, Intrepret and Act On.

Private message to Kimberly Lair

Kimberly Lair May 22, 2020 1:05pm

I liked that Ms. Bouchard discussed with her students what she means by collaborative discussions and she gave them two ways that she would be looking for them to use.  During their discussions, she walked around the room listening to them and encouraging them with more questions.  She also helped them change their questions so that their partner could link their ideas to the discussion. Students began to see what Ms. Bouchard meant by building on other ideas to create discussion. 

Private message to cindy conner

cindy conner Apr 19, 2019 9:40pm

Ms. Bouchard involved her students by letting them take control of their learning. She allowed for them to discuss and assess themselves and she listened and clarified things for them to see if they understood before they moved on. They worked in collaborative groups which led them to ask and answer questions of each other so they got to be teachers as well.

Formative Assessment: Collaborative Discussions Transcript

  • Formative Assessment Process.PDF

External Resource Materials

  • Smarter Balanced Website
  • Smarter Balanced Digital Library

Transcripts

Kelly: So do you have any ideas like that on here? Student: Collaborative also means what you said, but it also means like to work together. Student: You should not talk when another person's talking. Kelly: So today we are going to be talking about what makes a group discussion really effective and what it means to collaborate in a small group. Lower Third: Kelly Bouchard 4th Grade ELA Teacher, Hubbell Elementary School, Bristol, CT

Kelly: My name is Kelly Bouchard. I teach fourth grade at Alan P. Hubbell School in Bristol, CT. On your desks in front of you in your table groups, I put a poster. When I take a look at some of the questions that we have on that poster, take a look at number one. Student: What does the word "collaborate" mean? What makes a discussion collaborative? Student: What does it mean to build on others' ideas?

Kelly: In the clarify piece, first the kids worked together to come up with ideas of what they thought a collaborative discussion was. When you come up with an answer to these questions, you're going to write it on your post-it note and put it right in that box, so that we can keep track of all of your smart ideas. Go ahead and get started. Student: I think collaborate means work together, teamwork. Basically, it's trying to write [ph?].

Kelly: I was just kind of trying to listen in and make sure that everyone was getting a chance to talk, that it was their ideas. I didn't want to add too much to their discussion because I wanted them to really own that and have it be their own. Student: I think collaborate means that maybe to share ideas with other people. Kelly: I stepped in if it seemed like the kids didn't know what the questions were asking them and kind of got them back on track in that way, but I really let them have their own conversations.

Students: What questions can you ask to better understand your classmates' ideas? Student: You could ask, "What do you mean?" Kelly: And then I introduced them to the learning targets and to the success criteria. Card: Student Learning Goal & Success Criteria Learning Goal: I understand that building on others' ideas helps create collaborative discussions. Success Criteria: I can ask my classmates questions to better understand their ideas. I can link my ideas to my classmates' ideas in collaborative discussions.

Kelly: And I use them in kid-friendly statements so that the kids knew exactly what they were looking for. We're going to take a look at what you just wrote and we're going to think about these things. It says, I understand that building on each other's ideas helps create collaborative discussions. So there's two things that you can do to help create a collaborative discussion. You can ask your classmates questions to better understand their ideas, and you can link your

ideas to your classmates' ideas in a collaborative discussion. So these are some of the things you were just talking about at your tables, right? And then the students help to add on to the success criteria and give examples of the success criteria so that we could decide what it was going to look like in our class specifically. You are going to decide which post-it note best answers the question, how do I help create a collaborative discussion? As a table, you

need to decide which post-it note best answers that question, and you're going to write it down on a sentence strip. Students: Make eye contact so they know you're listening. Kelly: So what do you guys think? How can you create a collaborative discussion? Student: I think asking, like, "What did you do this week?" and then they say, "I went to this haunted house, somewhere, so and so," and then you could just keep going.

Kelly: So asking questions and listening to what other people are saying? Those are good points. I'm going to have a couple of you share the ideas that you wrote on your sentence strip. Haley, go ahead. Haley: Make eye contact so they know you're listening. Kelly: Okay, good. Carolyn? Carolyn: You can say, "I don’t understand it. Can you say it again?" or "What do you mean?"

Kelly: I think it was effective because the kids kind of felt like they owned that success criteria, like we had all come up with what was going to make a collaborative discussion. Student: Oh, we just collaborated. Student: Yay, collaboration. Card: For more information about clarifying the intended learning for this task, go to the Toolkit section of this module.

Kelly: We have been reading "Tuck Everlasting" together as a class. So today we're going to practice some of these things to have a collaborative discussion about "Tuck Everlasting." If someone says something that you agree with or disagree with, you can use those words to link your ideas together. You can say, "I agree," or, "What about this?" So you're going to use all the things that you just talked about to have a really good discussion about our book, okay? Lower Third: Kelly Bouchard 4th Grade ELA Teacher, Hubbell Elementary School, Bristol, CT

Kelly: Before we started the eliciting evidence section, I kind of went over the success criteria again and told them specifically what kinds of things would help them meet those success criteria. I am going to post a question up here and you guys are going to have a really good collaborative discussion about this question. And then I gave them the first question and they were able to kind of try that out with that in the back of their mind.

I'm going to give you just a couple of minutes to talk about it and then we're going to check in on how we're doing, if we're asking each other questions, if we're linking our ideas to each other. So here's the first question I want you to talk about. Winnie learns an incredible story from the Tucks. How would you have felt about it? What would you have done?

Student: I'll probably wait till I'm 20 so I could spend the rest of the time with my family and then when I drink the water, I could spend time with those people, so I still have time with my family. Student: I'd actually probably want to do that too, because I want to see other things. Kelly: While they were discussing the questions, I walked around and wrote down evidence that I saw of them using the success criteria. Student: I would stay till I was older, then go back into the--

Kelly: So the worksheet that I had, it just had blank boxes for me to fill in the kids' names, because I didn't know who I was going to see at what point. Then it had a column for each of the success criteria that I was looking for. If kids were linking their ideas to other kids' ideas, if they were asking each other questions about their ideas, and then just a blank box for comments or anything else I wanted to write in there. All right, so here's our next question. Mae Tuck says that the spring is a big dangerous secret. Do you agree? Consider these

questions. What might happen if the secret was revealed to the public? How would people's lives be changed for the better or worse? How would society be affected? Student: You would still live but it would really sad. Student: I agree with that, because people would not think about that, when they just drank it.

Kelly: I think that using this formative assessment process is a big shift in teaching because maybe if I wasn't using this in this lesson, I would have just given the kids a bunch of questions to talk about and not really checked in and not listened in to see if they were actually doing things. But I think it will also shift into not only this small part of the day, but when they're having any kind of discussion, which was what I had focused on, they're going to be thinking about those things in the back of their mind.

Student: I think if the secrete was revealed, everyone would take a drink and no one would ever die. Student: I agree. Student: Yeah, me too. Card: For more information about eliciting evidence for this task, go to the Toolkit section of this module. Kelly: What might happen if the secret was revealed to the public? Student: If the secret of the fountain was released to the public, then well that would be bad. Kelly: Today's lesson was about collaborative discussion. Lower Third: Kelly Bouchard 4th Grade ELA Teacher, Hubbell Elementary School, Bristol, CT

Kelly: I gave the kids questions about a text that we had been reading together to answer in their small groups. So while the kids were talking, I was interpreting the evidence by walking around and listening in on their groups. Charli: I think people are just going to go around, being a wild pack of wolves, trying to search for that water. Lower Third: Charli 4th Grade Student, Hubbell Elementary School, Bristol, CT Charli: Today we were discussing how to collaborate with other students in the classroom.

Student: I'd be so shocked, that I would just stay with them, but I don't know if I should drink the water or not. So I would just drink it to see what it does. Student: I'll agree. Student: I'll agree, yeah.

Kelly: When I was taking the notes, I saw trends in the evidence right away. Most kids that I went to were using some sort of linking word or phrase, but I didn't really take any notes on evidence of kids asking each other questions, so I knew right away that they were kind of solid with the linking their ideas, but I needed to do something so that they would remember that they're supposed to asking each other questions. Sounds like you guys were having some great discussions. I want to check in with you. Remember, what we're trying to do today is ask our

classmates questions to better understand their ideas, and link our ideas to our classmates' ideas, using those linking phrases. So some of you, I heard you saying things like, "I agree, I disagree," or things like, "Yeah, I think that too." I didn't hear too many kids ask questions. Some of the questions that you guys wrote down were things like, what made you think that, or why do you think that? That's going to help us better understand what our friends are thinking. Okay, Kayden?

Kayden: They let the person asked the question. You didn't get it, so maybe should ask him the stuff before going on, because then you're going to be like, "I don't know what he meant." Then if he keeps going, you still won't know.

Kelly: That's a great idea. All right, here's what we're going to do next. Then the students completed a self-reflection sheet. All right, so let's take a look at this together. It says, did you meet the success criteria? To reflect on where you are in your learning, answer the questions in the chart about your participation in the discussion. Right, you can get started on those. I think the self-reflection piece was important because it allowed the kids to really

feel like they have ownership in what they're doing and they can say to themselves, "Oh, we're supposed to be asking each other questions. We're supposed to be linking our ideas." You were asking more questions so that you could understand their ideas? Student: Yeah. I asked Michaela, what if they didn't want to live forever?

Kelly: Nice. All right, go, you can get your ideas down. Card: For more information about interpreting evidence for this task, go to the Toolkit section of this module.

Kelly: What do you think we need to do before we answer the next question? What are we going to work on as a class? Charlie? Charlie: Try to ask each other more questions because we're pretty much all saying our own thing. Lower Third: Kelly Bouchard 4th Grade ELA Teacher, Hubbell Elementary School, Bristol, CT

Kelly: Today's lesson was about collaborative discussion and the formative assessment process, so it allowed myself and the students to act on feedback immediately, based on what was happening in the lesson. I heard a lot of kids sharing their own ideas, but ask each other questions about that. Student: If it did change the people's lives forever, they probably wouldn't mind. Student: Why do you think they would want to live forever?

Student: I probably would think, they probably would like to live forever, instead of dying, and losing their family members or something like that. Kelly: Bam-bada-bam-bam. Students: Bam-bam. Kelly: Based on what we talked about before you started this question, how did you change your group discussions? Michaela? Michaela: At first when we did our first question, we really didn't ask a lot of questions, but for our second one, we asked a couple of questions.

Kelly: Okay, Charlie? Charlie: People were asking a lot of questions, because we all had really weird ideas about what would happen. Kelly: So you were asking questions about your ideas? Charlie: Yeah.

Kelly: Okay. Taylor and Anthony are going to pass out a self-reflection for you guys. Please put your name on the top. The students completed a self-reflection sheet on how well they felt they had met the success criteria and they had to give examples. I went around using the notes that I had taken before to kind of check in with some of the kids how they thought that they did. Did you link your ideas to anyone else's ideas? Mm-hmm, yeah, when I was listening in, I heard you say things like, "I agree,"

and then at one point you said, "Yeah, that would be amazing." Student: We kind of did to Rihanna's idea.

Kelly: Yeah, okay. When I listened in, I heard you sharing a lot of really awesome ideas, but I didn't really hear you linking your ideas to anyone else's, so agreeing or disagreeing or adding more to what they said. That might be something you want to work on. I think formative assessment really allows me to see where my class is in that moment, not after a lesson has happened, and it will help me align my teaching to what they need in that moment. If you are done, on the back of your paper at the bottom, you can write

down what you're going to do next time, so what your own personal goal is for next time we have a group discussion. I think a lot of times in lessons, you just kind of go and go and you might not have that opportunity, where this really allowed me to see, okay, if I just say this or ask the kids this, we can turn this completely around and we can have another strength by the end of the day. What do you think we need to do as a class to get even better at having collaborative discussions? David?

Student: Maybe listening to each other and try to make the group's answers better.

Kelly: I think the bottom line is that kids feel like they have ownership in their learning and the teacher also has this powerful tool that they can use to address their instruction in the moment. You guys did a really nice job of asking each other questions about what you were saying and also adding to each other's ideas. Card: For more information about acting on evidence for this task, go to the Toolkit section of this module.

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3 tips for understanding when—and how—to use formative assessment

formative assessment discussion

When I was in the classroom, I felt skilled using data. My students set daily personal goals, we had learning targets based on our data, and students had assessment goals. I often taught whole-group lessons, though, and thinking back, I wonder why. How did I know all the students I was delivering whole-group learning to needed that particular lesson? I didn’t. Formative assessment could have helped me.

After I left teaching, I spent time learning more about formative assessment. I realize now that I struggled with my understanding of delivering and analyzing formative assessments. I let my curriculum map determine what I taught instead of my students’ data. While there’s nothing I can do about the past, I hope that by sharing what I’ve learned, I can help you in your classroom today. Knowing how to use formative assessment effectively can inform your whole-group, small-group, and in-the-moment instruction and help you meet students where they are.

Reminder: What formative assessment is (and isn’t)

NWEA uses the following definition of “formative assessment,” adapted with permission from the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO) : “Formative assessment is a planned, ongoing process used by all students and teachers during learning and teaching to elicit and use evidence of student learning to improve student understanding of intended disciplinary learning outcomes and support students to become self-directed learners.”

Knowing how to use formative assessment effectively can inform your whole-group, small-group, and in-the-moment instruction and help you meet students where they are.

The words “planned, ongoing process” really stand out to me. There are moments where formative assessment is very intentional, or planned. You decide ahead of time to have an exit ticket at the end of every unit, for example. There are other opportunities where formative assessment is more spontaneous, where you realize there’s a disconnect with your students and you pause to explore why. After multiple quizzical looks from your kids, for example, you stop, ask a specific question related to your lesson, and have them answer using a thumbs-up for “yes” or thumbs-down for “no.”

While the definition doesn’t spell this out explicitly, it’s important to remember that formative assessment should not be graded . Its sole purpose is to increase your understanding so you can adjust your teaching. It’s never about penalizing kids for what they don’t know yet.

Tip #1: Use formative assessment to prepare for whole-group instruction

There is a time and a place for whole-group learning . Whole-group instruction is good for introducing new concepts and encouraging whole-class engagement. (For ideas on how to get kids excited to learn together, read “The best whole-group engagement strategies.” ) Typically, whole-group instruction is targeted toward the average student in your class.

Data can provide insight into what you can teach in a whole-group setting. Using formative assessment at the end of a previous day’s lesson or at the start of a new lesson will allow you to see what your students already know about the standard you have targeted to teach. Consider using an exit or entrance ticket , for example.

The Teacher Toolkit walks you through how to use entrance tickets in your classroom. Start by having a question on the board related to the day’s learning. Allow yourself time to review the data you gather before proceeding to the whole-group lesson. You may find you have misconceptions about what your students know or that there are things they’ve misunderstood that you can address before beginning. When reviewing your formative assessment data, you may also find that what you thought should have been a whole-group lesson may need to be taught in small groups instead. What would tip you off to this? A wide array of answers proving a big range of differing abilities.

Tip #2: Let formative assessment data guide small-group work

Like my colleague Tami Hunter mentioned in her post “How to use flexible grouping remotely,” “Using flexible grouping strategies can be a great way to keep kids engaged in learning, empower students to own their learning, increase understanding through collaboration, and allow for social connections.” To be flexible, your small groups should be fluid and change frequently based on the standard you are working on and on your formative assessment data.

Formative assessment […] gives you the information you need to make instructional decisions based on exactly where students are, and it helps students have buy-in and ownership of their learning.

Small groups allow you to provide scaffolding based on where your students are . You can specifically target your lesson based on the needs of the students in that group. Your instruction will vary depending on which group you are working with and what level they are on. With some groups, you will need to help the students reach the grade-level expectation of a standard by filling gaps in previous skills. Other groups may be right on target and able to learn the new standard with ease. Some groups may have already mastered the standard you’re on and are ready to explore it more deeply or even move on to the next standard.

By providing this targeted attention to student learning needs you can help students grow and be empowered in their learning paths. While working with small groups you can also differentiate seat work or centers that are not teacher directed. Work groups could have a designated tub or folder with assignments that are targeted to meet students’ learning needs, for example. This does take more planning up front, but if you have planning or data conversations with your grade-level teams, you can plan these varied tasks together and share the load.

Tip #3: Wield formative assessment feedback to make in-the-moment adjustments

Whether you’re teaching the whole class or have broken into groups, you’ll have a multitude of opportunities to adjust your instruction—right before, during, or immediately after a lesson—based on the needs of your students. There are several simple strategies you can try right away to target your instruction and help students grow academically. Here are some examples of formative assessment techniques and when to use them.

Right before a lesson

  • Standards check-in. I have used a standards check-in in kindergarten through middle school and wrote more about it in a previous post . Start by posting the lesson’s standard on a chart. Give each student a colored sticky note and tell them to write their name. Ask students to rate how they feel about the standard before they get started. This will help you create the learning target based on the standard as well as develop success criteria. It is also good to conduct another check at the end of the lesson to see if students have progressed in their understanding of the standard.
  • Pre-assessment. This type of assessment is given at the start of a unit or lesson to see what students know, so you can decide how to address learning needs before beginning the lesson. I encourage you to read this blog post to learn more.

During a lesson

  • Questioning. How you ask questions in your classroom can be a way of formatively assessing. Be intentional about planning your questions before lessons and make sure the questions you ask are higher order and train the brain to think deeply. Achieve the Core explains the purpose of developing questions to make meaning in their article “Creating and sequencing text-dependent questions to support English language learners” (note that their tips are useful for all students). Math teacher and trainer Craig Barton digs into this, too, in his article “What is a diagnostic question?”
  • All-student response systems. Having all students give you feedback at once can give you insight into how students are processing material as they’re receiving it. I really like Emerging Ed Tech’s article “Top 5 student response systems that work on multiple platforms.” Want to try a response system that’s lower tech? Ask students to use whiteboards and hold them up to answer questions during a lesson, or have them use hand signals .

Immediately after a lesson

  • Metacognition. When students are aware of their thinking throughout a lesson, they’re practicing metacognition, something that helps them process the material and better understand how they think. End a lesson by having students reflect on what—and how—they learned. This practice can help them retain more of the material .
  • Exit ticket. While entrance tickets are given at the start of a lesson, exit tickets are given at the end. There are several ways to use exit tickets both virtually and on paper, as demonstrated by We Are Teachers .

Never stop learning

Formative assessment empowers both teachers and students. It gives you the information you need to make instructional decisions based on exactly where students are, and it helps students have buy-in and ownership of their learning. To learn more about how to make formative assessment a bigger part of your practice, download Making it work: How formative assessment can supercharge your practice .

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  • Formative Assessment

Classroom discussions can tell the teacher much about student learning and understanding of basic concepts. The teacher can initiate the discussion by presenting students with an open-ended question. The goal is to build knowledge and develop critical and creative thinking skills. Discussions allow students to increase the breadth and depth of their understanding while discarding erroneous information and expanding and explicating background knowledge (Black and Wiliam 1998; Doherty 2003).

  • Humans process events verbally
  • Speech makes thinking “visible,” concrete
  • Discussion is a way of testing and exploring new ideas
  • Students acquire knowledge and insight from diverse points of view
  • Conversation provides practice with problems and concepts
  • Students’ awareness of, and tolerance for, ambiguity or complexity increases
  • Students recognize and investigate their assumptions
  • Attentive, respectful listening is encouraged Intellectual agility is increased
  • Students become connected to a topic It shows respect for students' voices and experiences
  • Students are affirmed as co-creators of knowledge
  • It develops the capacity for the clear communication of ideas and meaning
  • It develops habits of collaborative learning
  • Students develop skills of synthesis and integration

Discussion Links

  • Real World Model of Classroom Discussion
  • Indiana University Teaching Handbook - Preparing | Facilitating | Problems with | Managing
  • Colorado State University - Excellent SIMPLE guide designed for developing strategies successful discussions
  • How to Encourage Classroom Discussion
  • National School Reform Faculty - Microlabs:  to address a specific sequence of questions in a structured format with small groups, using active listening skills.  Download Microlabs here .

Plymouth Community School Corporation

611 Berkley Street, Plymouth, IN 46563 Ph: 574-936-3115 - Fx: 574-936-3160

  • Exit / Admit Slips
  • Graphic Organizers
  • Kinesthetic Assessments
  • Learning & Response Logs
  • Observations
  • Online Quizzes & Polls
  • Peer & Self Assessments
  • Presentations
  • Questioning
  • Summarizing
  • Think, Pair, Share
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Formative assessments

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How this will help:

Face-to-face teaching frequently involves visual observation of students “understanding” a course. Faculty frequently use informal methods for what we call “formative assessment” but may not be familiar with the terminology or how to transform informal formative assessment to online.

Have you ever experienced teaching a topic in your face-to-face class and getting the blank  stare of students who just did not understand? Perhaps you use “clickers” to knowledge check students partway through a lecture or create practice tests so students can check their understanding. You may ask your students questions in-class to gauge how well a concept is being understood.

The above examples are formative assessment strategies that you may have encountered in your daily teaching. Formative assessment is the process of understanding the progress of your students’ learning rather than strictly their performance on a final assessment (like a paper or exam). Formative assessment benefits your class in several ways:

  • Students get a low-stakes opportunity to check their understanding of a topic.
  • Students potentially get feedback on their own knowledge of content.
  • Instructors can adjust teaching strategies to try to reach every student.

Formative assessment often happens in low-stakes or informal ways. In a face-to-face setting, you may get physical cues that indicate that students may be struggling with content. In response, you may go over content again to reinforce a concept or explain a topic differently. If a student is not engaging, you may physically walk over to see how they are doing, or invite them to attend office hours.

A lot of these physical cues are absent in an online class. Sometimes instructors initially struggle with how to know how students are doing with content when they can’t “see” the student. In addition, online courses are often already text-heavy, and an additional assessment to grade may not be desirable.

However, there are ways to check in with students on their understanding of content for the week. You may find that a concept was not clear in a video based on discussion board or chat messages. You may get questions from students on a topic that suggests further explanation may be necessary. You can also be proactive about formative assessment by asking students to complete a weekly short content reflection or use online video response quizzes to see where they are at. 

Formative assessment works best when the stakes are low. The goal is not to assess student performance, but rather to identify places where misconceptions or where students are struggling with content. It helps when you offer a point or two of credit for completing formative assessments. In a face-to-face class, you might have a set of participation or engagement points.

Practical tips

  • Create a “minute paper” check-in each week. Use a quiz or survey tool (even Google Forms works!), ask students 2 questions: What was the clearest point of content, what was the most confusing/muddiest point of content. You do not need to read this content closely, rather monitor the responses looking for points of confusion or what content really resonated with students. If you aren’t familiar with the “minute paper” concept, CRLT has resources on how to integrate this effective technique. 
  • Use online polls to survey student knowledge on content that students frequently struggle with. Embed polls into a weekly discussion post or an email. [Link to the technology doc on using polls]
  • Crowdsource a FAQ for each week’s content. In your discussion board, create a thread or forum for questions just for that week. Students can post questions (and possibly responses) to these questions. Be sure to monitor and answer questions as necessary. It’s also helpful to curate your responses because students’ questions may tend to stay the same each year. 
  • Make it clear to students that although there may be points involved in these activities, the awarding of points is not tied to performance. Points are awarded for completion. 

University of Michigan

CRLT- Screencast on minute paper

Gikandi, J. W., Morrow, D., & Davis, N. E. (2011). Online formative assessment in higher education: A review of the literature. Computers and Education , 57 (4), 2333–2351. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.compedu.2011.06.004

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Using Discussion as a Summative Assessment

Verbal participation in discussions is a tried-and-true formative assessment, but it can also be rubric-based and summative.

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Throughout my two decades in education, I have experimented with a variety of approaches to assessment, including projects, models, debates, and traditional assessments. In the past two years I’ve been teaching high school online, and I’ve abandoned traditional tests in favor of more compassionate forms of assessment. My new favorite is the discussion assessment, and I hope I can inspire you to add it to your assessment toolbox whether you’re teaching online like me or in a classroom.

My first foray into discussion assessment involved the cellular energy unit in my biology course. Many students struggle to see the relevance of photosynthesis and cellular respiration and thus find the concepts overly challenging. I decided to experiment with discussion as a way to help students engage with the concepts on a deep level but also feel encouraged to explore, share understandings, and learn during the assessment process. 

At a recent professional development session, I heard the phrase “compassionate assessment.” It was loosely defined as supportive, rather than punitive, assessment practices. My discussion assessment is compassionate, as it supports critical thinking, allows students to teach each other, and provides students an opportunity to master content. In the best discussions, students ask probing questions that take the class into new territory, and we all learn together. At the end, students have expressed how interesting and fun the class felt—something that never happens after traditional tests.

Getting Started

To get started with discussion assessments, outline a few meaty questions before you begin your unit. For a class of 20–25 students, I find that six questions in a 90-minute period is the maximum. Start with those essential unit questions you want students to understand, and then branch out to some of your favorite extension topics that you will touch on, or hope students will want to explore. Students’ questions and work during the unit often inspire great discussion questions, so it’s OK to not be thoroughly backward-planned.

I like to tease these questions throughout the unit. Since I’m a science teacher, my units are driven by phenomena, so I am always coming back to the driving phenomenon we are working to explain. My students answer a lesson question each day (which I use instead of a traditional objective or learning target), so the idea of having layers of questions makes sense to them. When we finally arrive at the end of the unit, students are ready to synthesize their learning about the questions we’ve been working to answer.

Implementation

To have a successful and productive discussion, I give students a full class period to choose their questions and to start writing response outlines. We typically use a claim, evidence, and reasoning framework (you’ll want to teach this structure before the discussion prep, if necessary). I encourage students to find visuals to support their responses. 

Allowing students choice over which question to answer is important; if we want students to show what they know, they must be able to choose the questions they understand the best. It’s also impossible for every student to share their thinking in response to all six questions, so limiting preparation to three or four questions helps. If possible, assign discussion preparation through your learning management system so you can track students’ preparation.

On the day of the discussion, students run the show, and you moderate. I begin by calling on a student and asking them to share their claim. I provide discussion starters to support productive talk and record student contributions in a spreadsheet. 

Every student is called on for the questions they prepared, but students may participate in all questions. Students agree and disagree with each other, build on each other’s ideas, and ask clarifying and probing questions. When students express ideas that are incorrect, they help each other understand—and most important, no points are deducted. Students can only earn points during the discussion, which results in a wonderfully supportive experience for all members of the classroom community. The rubric I provide to students delineates how I score the quantity and quality of their participation and makes sure that each student is contributing to the discussion for all questions prepared.

Documentation and Adaptation

Students must take notes during the discussion. This not only holds them accountable for learning, it also results in notes that support the formal writing assessment I assign afterward, in which students choose one discussion question to respond to in a paragraph. 

This written assessment makes the process more rigorous—adding a writing task allows students to synthesize what they learned in the discussion. I’ve found that this student writing is of much higher quality compared with short-answer responses on previous traditional assessments, which makes them more rewarding for me to evaluate.

But what about students who don’t prepare, don’t participate, or are absent? I simply turn the discussion questions into an alternative assessment and require that students choose two or three of them to respond to in paragraph form. This way, all students have the opportunity to demonstrate deep content knowledge and critical thinking. I always suggest that teachers try a new approach in their least favorite unit or the unit where previous projects or assessments have not worked out. Some additional teacher resources to inspire you include these discussion sentence stems and a discussion rubric , which you can adapt or modify for your class.

  • Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning
  • Instructional Guide
  • Formative and Summative Assessment

Assessment is the process of gathering data. More specifically, assessment is the ways instructors gather data about their teaching and their students’ learning (Hanna & Dettmer, 2004). The data provide a picture of a range of activities using different forms of assessment such as: pre-tests, observations, and examinations. Once these data are gathered, you can then evaluate the student’s performance. Evaluation, therefore, draws on one’s judgment to determine the overall value of an outcome based on the assessment data. It is in the decision-making process then, where we design ways to improve the recognized weaknesses, gaps, or deficiencies.

Types of Assessment

There are three types of assessment: diagnostic, formative, and summative. Although are three are generally referred to simply as assessment, there are distinct differences between the three.

There are three types of assessment: diagnostic, formative, and summative.

Diagnostic Assessment

Diagnostic assessment can help you identify your students’ current knowledge of a subject, their skill sets and capabilities, and to clarify misconceptions before teaching takes place (Just Science Now!, n.d.). Knowing students’ strengths and weaknesses can help you better plan what to teach and how to teach it.

Types of Diagnostic Assessments

  • Pre-tests (on content and abilities)
  • Self-assessments (identifying skills and competencies)
  • Discussion board responses (on content-specific prompts)
  • Interviews (brief, private, 10-minute interview of each student)

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment provides feedback and information during the instructional process, while learning is taking place, and while learning is occurring. Formative assessment measures student progress but it can also assess your own progress as an instructor. For example, when implementing a new activity in class, you can, through observation and/or surveying the students, determine whether or not the activity should be used again (or modified). A primary focus of formative assessment is to identify areas that may need improvement. These assessments typically are not graded and act as a gauge to students’ learning progress and to determine teaching effectiveness (implementing appropriate methods and activities).

A primary focus of formative assessment is to identify areas that may need improvement.

Types of Formative Assessment

  • Observations during in-class activities; of students non-verbal feedback during lecture
  • Homework exercises as review for exams and class discussions)
  • Reflections journals that are reviewed periodically during the semester
  • Question and answer sessions, both formal—planned and informal—spontaneous
  • Conferences between the instructor and student at various points in the semester
  • In-class activities where students informally present their results
  • Student feedback collected by periodically answering specific question about the instruction and their self-evaluation of performance and progress

Summative Assessment

Summative assessment takes place after the learning has been completed and provides information and feedback that sums up the teaching and learning process. Typically, no more formal learning is taking place at this stage, other than incidental learning which might take place through the completion of projects and assignments.

Rubrics, often developed around a set of standards or expectations, can be used for summative assessment. Rubrics can be given to students before they begin working on a particular project so they know what is expected of them (precisely what they have to do) for each of the criteria. Rubrics also can help you to be more objective when deriving a final, summative grade by following the same criteria students used to complete the project.

Rubrics also can help you to be more objective when deriving a final, summative grade by following the same criteria students used to complete the project.

High-stakes summative assessments typically are given to students at the end of a set point during or at the end of the semester to assess what has been learned and how well it was learned. Grades are usually an outcome of summative assessment: they indicate whether the student has an acceptable level of knowledge-gain—is the student able to effectively progress to the next part of the class? To the next course in the curriculum? To the next level of academic standing? See the section “Grading” for further information on grading and its affect on student achievement.

Summative assessment is more product-oriented and assesses the final product, whereas formative assessment focuses on the process toward completing the product. Once the project is completed, no further revisions can be made. If, however, students are allowed to make revisions, the assessment becomes formative, where students can take advantage of the opportunity to improve.

Summative assessment...assesses the final product, whereas formative assessment focuses on the process...

Types of Summative Assessment

  • Examinations (major, high-stakes exams)
  • Final examination (a truly summative assessment)
  • Term papers (drafts submitted throughout the semester would be a formative assessment)
  • Projects (project phases submitted at various completion points could be formatively assessed)
  • Portfolios (could also be assessed during it’s development as a formative assessment)
  • Performances
  • Student evaluation of the course (teaching effectiveness)
  • Instructor self-evaluation

Assessment measures if and how students are learning and if the teaching methods are effectively relaying the intended messages. Hanna and Dettmer (2004) suggest that you should strive to develop a range of assessments strategies that match all aspects of their instructional plans. Instead of trying to differentiate between formative and summative assessments it may be more beneficial to begin planning assessment strategies to match instructional goals and objectives at the beginning of the semester and implement them throughout the entire instructional experience. The selection of appropriate assessments should also match course and program objectives necessary for accreditation requirements.

Hanna, G. S., & Dettmer, P. A. (2004). Assessment for effective teaching: Using context-adaptive planning. Boston, MA: Pearson A&B.

Just Science Now! (n.d.). Assessment-inquiry connection. https://www.justsciencenow.com/assessment/index.htm

Selected Resources

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Northern Illinois University Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning. (2012). Formative and summative assessment. In Instructional guide for university faculty and teaching assistants. Retrieved from https://www.niu.edu/citl/resources/guides/instructional-guide

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Formative assessment in discussion tasks

Daniel Parsons has been teaching in Japan for ten years. He started out as an assistant language teacher on the JET Programme. He now teaches university EFL and EAP classes, and is researching teaching methods which apply formative assessment, and is interested in how technology can be applied in this area. He currently works as an instructor at Kwansei Gakuin University in the School of Science and Technology. Email: [email protected]

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Daniel Parsons, Formative assessment in discussion tasks, ELT Journal , Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 January 2017, Pages 24–36, https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/ccw043

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Open discussion tasks that involve problem-solving and the sharing of ideas are not amenable to the elicitation of target language forms. By systematically introducing formative assessment into the task, it is possible to improve students’ elaboration of language related episodes (LREs). In this article, I describe and evaluate the implementation of a resource based on the principles of formative assessment. Through the use of extracts focusing on students’ LREs, I show how formative assessment can be embedded into discussion tasks. The extracts reveal that students are capable of engaging in formative assessment, but may require more training in order to focus on specific language forms.

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Teaching excellence & educational innovation, what is the difference between formative and summative assessment, formative assessment.

The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments:

  • help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work
  • help faculty recognize where students are struggling and address problems immediately

Formative assessments are generally low stakes , which means that they have low or no point value. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to:

  • draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topic
  • submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lecture
  • turn in a research proposal for early feedback

Summative assessment

The goal of summative assessment is to evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit by comparing it against some standard or benchmark.

Summative assessments are often high stakes , which means that they have a high point value. Examples of summative assessments include:

  • a midterm exam
  • a final project
  • a senior recital

Information from summative assessments can be used formatively when students or faculty use it to guide their efforts and activities in subsequent courses.

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International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

HCII 2022: Social Computing and Social Media: Applications in Education and Commerce pp 115–126 Cite as

Online Formative Assessment and Feedback: A Focus Group Discussion Among Language Teachers

  • Ajrina Hysaj   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-3367-4648 8 &
  • Harshita Aini Haroon   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4978-1170 9  
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  • First Online: 16 June 2022

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS,volume 13316)

Formative assessment and the provision of formative feedback are key factors in effective teaching and learning. Generally, while teachers understand the role of feedback, studies show there is a tendency for them to provide it when a task comes to a complete. When teaching took to the online mode due to forced conditions imposed by COVID-19, questions arise about the provision of formative feedback particularly since teachers have been found to struggle teaching online. In this paper, we report on a preliminary study involving five university faculty who teach language courses. We present the respondents’ (1) views and practices on using the computer for teaching online (2) practices of providing formative assessment and feedback online and (3) their intentions to proceed with online formative assessment and feedback. By and large, the faculty were comfortable teaching online. While they did agree on the importance of formative feedback and attempted to provide these in their classes, they reported issues on using the appropriate tools or assigning the appropriate tasks for the purpose. They also talked of the stress in doing so, relating it with pedagogical, technical and institutional management factors. With effective learning in mind, the group was divided on whether or not they would proceed with online formative assessment and feedback, if the choice was available to them. This paper concludes with recommendation for further research and consideration for teaching online.

  • Formative assessment
  • Formative feedback
  • Online learning
  • Language teachers

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Hysaj, A., Haroon, H.A. (2022). Online Formative Assessment and Feedback: A Focus Group Discussion Among Language Teachers. In: Meiselwitz, G. (eds) Social Computing and Social Media: Applications in Education and Commerce. HCII 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13316. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-05064-0_9

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  1. 7 Smart, Fast Formative Assessment Strategies

    2. Low-stakes quizzes and polls: If you want to find out whether your students really know as much as you think they know, polls and quizzes created with Socrative or Quizlet or in-class games and tools like Quizalize, Kahoot, FlipQuiz, Gimkit, Plickers, and Flippity can help you get a better sense of how much they really understand.

  2. 14 Examples of Formative Assessment [+FAQs]

    Online education glossary EdGlossary defines formative assessment as "a wide variety of methods that teachers use to conduct in-process evaluations of student comprehension, learning needs, and academic progress during a lesson, unit, or course."

  3. 17.3: How can classroom discussions be used for assessment?

    This is a form of formative assessment that takes place during the learning process to help the teacher and student understand the discussed information. Class discussion should be used together with other forms of assessment such as written response, selected response, and performance assessment in order to fully assess students.

  4. Formative Assessments

    WHAT? Formative assessments occur before, during, and after a class session and data collected is used to inform improvements to teaching practices and/or student learning and engagement.

  5. Teachers' Essential Guide to Formative Assessment

    A formative assessment is a teaching practice—a question, an activity, or an assignment—meant to gain information about student learning. It's formative in that it is intentionally done for the purpose of planning or adjusting future instruction and activities.

  6. The ultimate formative assessment guide for teachers

    Lucie Renard — Jul 11, 2023 Formative assessment is gaining importance in our classrooms. Evaluation is not just about a final grade anymore: it's about pushing your students to get better learning outcomes; it's about feedback, and growing. Creating an effective teaching environment with formative assessment techniques and tools is important.

  7. Formative assessments: the ultimate guide for teachers

    "Formative assessment - while not a "silver bullet" that can solve all educational challenges - offers a powerful means for meeting goals for high-performance, ... Discussion boards. Age group: all. With discussion boards, students write what they know about a topic on the whiteboard. This could be as a mind map, graffiti wall, or ...

  8. 8 Quick Formative Assessment Strategies

    8 Quick Checks for Understanding Formative assessment is a proven technique for improving student learning, and the strategies shared here by Jay McTighe work both in the classroom and remotely. By Jay McTighe January 28, 2021 Bob Daemmrich / Alamy Stock Photo

  9. Formative Assessment Strategies for Everyday Teaching

    Discussion-Based Strategies. Concentric circles. This formative assessment strategy also includes a kinesthetic element. The teacher arranges all the student desks in two circles with the same number of desks: an inner and outer circle. The teacher prompts one group to move to the left or right, and then sit down in front of a new partner.

  10. How to write questions for formative assessment

    Writing closed questions. Closed questions, often in the form of knowledge tests, are a common approach to assess how well learners know a particular topic. These tests are often written as a list of recall questions that require short one- or two-word answers. In this summative approach, questions need to be closed and unambiguous.

  11. 7 Ways to Do Formative Assessments in Your Virtual Classroom

    Here are some different ways that teachers can use formative assessments in the virtual classroom: 1. Dipsticks. Like using a dipstick to check the oil in a car, teachers can use short, quick checks virtually to make sure that students are on track—both academically and emotionally. At the start of a live class, pose a general question about ...

  12. Formative Assessment: Collaborative Discussions

    Formative Assessment: Collaborative Discussions Lesson Objective: Formatively assess understanding of effective collaborative discussions Grade 4 / ELA / Discussion 15 MIN ELA.SL.4.1c Discussion Supporting Materials Thought starters How does Ms. Bouchard involve her students in establishing the learning goals and success criteria?

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    January 18, 2022 Category | Assessment 27 easy formative assessment strategies for gathering evidence of student learning A few years ago, I came across "10 assessments you can perform in 90 seconds" by TeachThought and really enjoyed the formative assessment strategies they outlined.

  14. 3 tips for understanding when—and how—to use formative assessment

    Tip #1: Use formative assessment to prepare for whole-group instruction. There is a time and a place for whole-group learning. Whole-group instruction is good for introducing new concepts and encouraging whole-class engagement. (For ideas on how to get kids excited to learn together, read "The best whole-group engagement strategies.")

  15. Discussion

    Discussion | Formative Assessment Classroom discussions can tell the teacher much about student learning and understanding of basic concepts. The teacher can initiate the discussion by presenting students with an open-ended question. The goal is to build knowledge and develop critical and creative thinking skills.

  16. Formative assessments

    Formative assessment is the process of understanding the progress of your students' learning rather than strictly their performance on a final assessment (like a paper or exam). Formative assessment benefits your class in several ways: Students get a low-stakes opportunity to check their understanding of a topic.

  17. Formative assessment: A systematic review of critical teacher

    1. Introduction Using assessment for a formative purpose is intended to guide students' learning processes and improve students' learning outcomes ( Van der Kleij, Vermeulen, Schildkamp, & Eggen, 2015; Bennett, 2011; Black & Wiliam, 1998 ).

  18. Classroom Discussion as a Summative Assessment

    Verbal participation in discussions is a tried-and-true formative assessment, but it can also be rubric-based and summative. By Rebecca Hall January 23, 2024 Anna Godeassi / The iSpot

  19. Formative and Summative Assessment

    Discussion board responses (on content-specific prompts) Interviews (brief, private, 10-minute interview of each student) Formative Assessment. Formative assessment provides feedback and information during the instructional process, while learning is taking place, and while learning is occurring. Formative assessment measures student progress ...

  20. Formative assessment in discussion tasks

    Abstract. Open discussion tasks that involve problem-solving and the sharing of ideas are not amenable to the elicitation of target language forms. By systematically introducing formative assessment into the task, it is possible to improve students' elaboration of language related episodes (LREs). In this article, I describe and evaluate the ...

  21. Formative vs Summative Assessment

    The goal of formative assessment is to monitor student learning to provide ongoing feedback that can be used by instructors to improve their teaching and by students to improve their learning. More specifically, formative assessments: help students identify their strengths and weaknesses and target areas that need work

  22. Formative Assessment: A Step-by-Step Guide for Teachers

    Ask formative assessment questions during whole class discussion to understand student comprehension. How to Use Formative Assessment Data to Improve Student Learning. One way to use formative assessment data is to create learning goals for each student. Teachers can then track whether or not each student is meeting these goals.

  23. Online Formative Assessment and Feedback: A Focus Group Discussion

    Formative assessment and the provision of formative feedback are key factors in effective teaching and learning. Generally, while teachers understand the role of feedback, studies show there is a tendency for them to provide it when a task comes to a complete. ... The discussion lasted for about two hours and teachers were able to express their ...

  24. Full article: Using Formative Assessment and Feedback from Student

    4.2 Implementing the reciprocal formative assessment and feedback cycle. In this section, I detail - with examples from the case study course - a reciprocal formative assessment and feedback cycle (see Figure 1) that allows instructors to gain insight into each individual student's understanding and make changes in their instruction based ...