What Is Formative Assessment?

What Is Formative Assessment?

Formative assessment refers to the wide variety of methods you can use to check for student understanding and progress during a lesson or unit. Its main goal is to collect detailed information that helps you improve instruction and student learning while it’s happening. Essentially, these in-process evaluations are assessments for learning, allowing you to make real-time adjustments, rather than assessments of learning, which typically happen at the end of an instructional period.

Formative Assessment Strategies and Activities

Formative assessment strategies are the methods teachers use to check for understanding, while activities are the specific tasks students perform to show what they know. These tools are designed to be quick, low-stakes, and integrated into daily instruction to provide a snapshot of student progress.

The information gathered from these assessments helps you figure out what comes next in your instruction. Based on the results, you can decide whether to move on, revisit a concept, or provide different paths for students.

Here are some common formative assessment strategies and activities:

• Exit/Admit Tickets: Students provide brief written responses to prompts at the beginning or end of a class to show their understanding.
• Think-Pair-Share: Students consider a question individually, discuss it with a partner, and then share their thoughts with the larger group.
• Low-Stakes Quizzes and Polls: Quick, informal quizzes or polls, often using digital tools, to check for comprehension without the pressure of a formal grade.
• Strategic Questioning: Asking higher-order questions, such as "how" and "why," to prompt deeper thinking and reveal student understanding.
• One-Minute Papers: At the end of a lesson, students write for one minute about a key takeaway or a point of confusion.
• Analysis of Student Work: Reviewing homework, classwork, or quizzes to identify common patterns of understanding or misunderstanding.
• Self-Assessment: Students reflect on their own learning using tools like rubrics, checklists, or simple signals like thumbs-up/down.
• Peer Feedback: Students review one another's work based on success criteria, helping them act as learning resources for each other.
• Dipsticks: Quick checks for understanding, such as asking students to write a letter to a friend explaining a concept or draw a sketch representing new knowledge.
• Misconception Checks: Presenting students with a common error or misconception and asking them to identify and correct it.

Formative Assessment Benefits

Formative assessment offers a structured way to monitor student progress toward learning objectives. It provides ongoing feedback that helps both you and your students track academic development in real time.

This approach helps identify student misconceptions and areas of difficulty, allowing for timely adjustments to instruction. The information gathered can also inform teaching practices and support student motivation and metacognition.

Here are some of the key benefits of formative assessment:

• Skill Development: It helps students build competencies by identifying their individual learning needs and guiding them toward specific goals.
• Refined Instruction: Analyzing student work gives you insights into their current understanding, which allows you to adapt your teaching for greater effectiveness.
• Student Engagement: Using techniques like higher-order questioning and providing wait time can increase student participation and interest in the lesson.
• Teacher Collaboration: The documentation of student progress and challenges provides a basis for teachers to work together and share effective strategies.
• Summative Performance: Regular formative checks can lead to improved student performance on summative assessments like final exams.
• Student Motivation: The process can support students' motivation to learn by making progress visible and manageable.
• Student Reflection: It gives students opportunities to think about their own learning process and identify how they can improve.
• Closing Learning Gaps: This method is effective for identifying and addressing the space between a student's current performance and the desired learning outcome.
• Timely Adjustments: It allows you to measure student progress in the moment, making it possible to adjust your teaching plan as needed.
• Targeted Support: The information gathered helps you identify specific student obstacles and provide more specialized support.

Formative Assessment Examples

There are many ways to implement formative assessments in your classroom. These methods range from quick, informal checks to more structured activities, all designed to give you a snapshot of student understanding during a lesson.

Formative assessments provide real-time information on student comprehension, which can help identify learning gaps as they appear. This data allows you to make immediate adjustments to your instruction, though it does require time to analyze the feedback and adapt your lesson plans accordingly.

Here are a few examples of formative assessment activities:

• Think-Pair-Share: Students reflect on a question, discuss their thoughts with a partner, and then share with the class, allowing you to observe their reasoning
• 3-2-1 Countdown: Students write down responses to a set of prompts, such as three new ideas, two interesting points, and one remaining question
• Round Robin Charts: Small groups of students respond to a question on a chart, which is then passed to another group to add more information before a class-wide discussion
• Strategic Questioning: Asking open-ended 'why' or 'how' questions to the class or small groups to check for deeper comprehension
• Self Assessment: Students use a rubric or checklist to evaluate their own work, helping them identify their strengths and areas for improvement

Formative Assessment Best Practices

Formative assessment best practices are centered on monitoring the learning process and providing ongoing feedback. These methods help instructors identify where students are struggling and adjust their teaching accordingly.

Effective implementation requires clear learning intentions and well-designed tasks that produce evidence of student understanding. This evidence is then used to inform instruction and guide students forward.

Here are some common formative assessment best practices:

• Analysis of Students' Work: Reviewing homework, quizzes, and other assignments to understand a student's current knowledge and skills.
• Strategic Questioning Strategies: Using higher-order questions, such as 'how' and 'why,' to encourage deeper thinking and gather evidence of learning.
• Think-Pair-Share: Students think about a question, discuss it with a partner, and then share with the class, giving the teacher insight into their learning process.
• Admit/Exit Tickets: Using brief written responses from students as they enter or leave the classroom to check their comprehension of a topic.
• One-Minute Papers: Asking students to respond to a short question in writing at the end of a lesson to assess their understanding.

Teach with TeachShare

Formative assessment provides the real-time feedback needed to adjust your teaching and support every student's progress. Start creating resources with TeachShare now to easily build these checks for understanding into your lessons.