five types of formative assessment in education

14 Examples of Formative Assessment [+FAQs]

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.”

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.

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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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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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Formative Assessment Types Explained & Simplified: How to Make Them Effective AND Easy

February 21, 2023 by Katelyn Hildebrand

What are the Formative Assessment Types? (Assessment FOR Learning!)

What is formative assessment vs summative, and which formative assessment types are the most effective? How do I progress monitor and track student data? Formative assessment is the number one way to align our instruction with what students need and it is so powerful.

Here are some formative assessment examples and definitions you can use to help tailor your instruction to YOUR students.

This formative assessment types list explains assessment FOR learning and easy ways to make the most of your formative assessments.

Formative assessments are like the secret sauce to teaching. You can have all of the immaculate, detailed lesson plans in the world–- but what really makes the difference is having a teacher that is responsive to the students. That is where the magic happens and instruction is effective because it is tailored to what the student actually needs.

The formative assessment types that will make the biggest difference can still be simple!

Formative Assessment vs. Summative Assessment

There are 2 main types of assessment: formative assessment and summative assessment .

Assessment of Learning vs Assessment for Learning: What’s the Difference?

determines student achievement levels and helps place students in appropriate groupings and learning settings
helps the teacher find out what the student needs and how to help them

Formative assessment vs summative assessment: what’s the difference?

Summative Assessment

What is summative assessment?

Summative Assessment definition: a test given to students at the END of a learning period to assess their level of achievement on a subject; scores are compared to a benchmark goal or set standard.
Be able to record results
Be able to report results
Be completely objective
End of Unit Tests
Quarter Benchmark Tests (often district-wide)
End-of-Year Benchmark Tests
State Standardized Testing
For older grades: assignments, homework, tests, and quizzes that accumulate to a student’s final score but do not change instructional strategies

Formative Assessment

What is formative assessment?

Formative Assessment definition: a test given to students DURING the learning period to guide instruction so that it meets the student’s needs.

Think of assessment as one big category split into 2 groups: formative assessment and summative assessment.

THEN, think of “formative assessment” as split into 3 smaller groups.

These smaller groups are the 3 different formative assessment types.

There are different formative assessment types that you can use to positively impact student success.

Formative Assessment Types

There are 3 types of formative assessment (plus an extra 4th one):

Screening Assessments
Diagnostic Assessments
Progress Monitoring Assessments
Informal Assessments (which are really a sub-type of progress monitoring)

Which formative assessment type you use depends on what your goal is and who you need to assess.

I pulled the graphic above from my Teacher’s Guide for How to Assess Reading post. It has a lot of information on how to assess each of the Big 5 Areas of Readin g .

1. Screening Assessments:

Goal : Identify any students who are struggling

Who : Assess the entire class

When : At the beginning of a learning period

What to do with data : Find students who are below-level and provide interventions

2. Diagnostic Assessments:

Goal : Figure out WHERE specifically struggling students have gaps and need intervention

Who : Students you identified in the screener assessment

When : After the screener but before interventions are given

What to do with data : Make a personalized student plan to address any gaps you found

3. Progress Monitoring:

Goal : Track student progress on a specific skill

Who : Students who are receiving intervention

When : Regularly and periodically throughout a learning period

What to do with data : Analyze it to see how you need to adjust instruction (I have a post coming soon about analyzing data!)

4. Informal Assessments: (a sub-type of progress monitoring)

Goal : Quickly check student understanding

Who : Whole class or individual students

When : Usually during or right after a lesson

What to do with data : (not always formally recorded)

use post-lesson data to determine if students understood a lesson
record anecdotal notes to give a well-rounded picture of student understanding
use mid-lesson checks to guide lesson pace

For screening and diagnostic assessments, I use this Comprehensive Reading Assessment . For progress monitoring, I use this easy Progress Monitoring flip-card system . I’ll dive into informal assessments below!

Data tracking for formative assessments can give you valuable information when used strategically, like in the tracking sheets that come with these Reading Intervention Binders .

When do I collect data from formative assessments?

Formative assessments are used in different ways.

Sometimes they are informal and are just used to quickly guide your instruction and get a feel for student understanding.
Sometimes they will be to identify specific student needs, track progress, and make strategic decisions in your lesson planning and intervention.

Record data for situation #2.

Do not stress about recording data for everything. Because honestly, not all data is equal. And too much data can lead to overwhelm and it’s too hard to glean anything from it then.

In my opinion, if you record every single worksheet/activity/response students do, you will spend all of your time entering numbers and the quality of the data will not always be great anyways.

Instead, collect data several times throughout a learning period using a high-quality, targeted assessment. This will make it easier to ensure the results are reliable and accurate, and lets you zero in on a specific skill. Then analyze THAT data. I’ll have more on how to analyze data soon!

These Reading Intervention Binders make data collection super easy. Each activity in the binder has a matching datasheet you can use to track student progress on reading skills!

These Reading Intervention Binders help you intervene AND track progress at the same time!

These formative assessment strategies will make your note-taking so much easier! Plus here are a couple of FREE editable note-taking tools (you need to have PowerPoint to download them)!

EASY Formative Note-Taking Strategies:

Note-taking is an important part of making your formative assessments useful, but it’s really hard to complete quickly and keep it organized.

Here are a few easy ways to keep your notes convenient and organized.

Taking notes while walking around the classroom:

Have a paper with a grid of squares on it (see the free download below) . Have each student’s name at the top of a square. Jot notes down in that student’s square as you observe.
OR, carry around a sticky notepad and write down notes for a student on the top sticky note. Then fold it up and write on a new sticky note for each student. Then after the lesson transfer the notes to a more permanent place like a data binder or spreadsheet.

Taking Notes during the middle of a lesson:

Have a class roster (see the free download below) printed out and easily accessible WHILE you are teaching. If you notice someone struggling during the middle of instruction, quickly (& discretely) circle/underline/star their name.
You could also have a notepad easily accessible to write the names of students you want to follow up with when they move on to independent work.

CLICK HERE to download some FREE Editable Note-Taking Tools you can use with these strategies! (note: you will need to have PowerPoint to be able to access and download them)

What do you take notes on?

Skills the student struggles with
Consistent mistakes they make
Specific words or phonics patterns they need more practice on
Concepts the student is confused on
Cues you give that you notice work for that student
Strengths and positive praise you notice about them!! (especially great to share at parent-teacher conferences)

Progress monitoring can be overwhelming, but using a consistent format like these progress monitoring cards can help keep it simple and effective.

Progress Monitoring for Intervention

When Progress monitoring is used to inform intervention, it needs to be more strategic and organized. It’s important to track the student’s response to intervention so you know if your intervention is working. You also need to show evidence of progress by providing data at IEPs and parent-teacher conferences. Organized and specific data is the perfect way to do that!

How do you Progress Monitor?

Choose one skill the student needs to build (identified from a diagnostic assessment).
Create a SIMPLE assessment you can give them every 1-3 weeks.
Keep the assessment the same, just switch out the words/letters/questions.
Record the scores for each administration and track progress or regression.

FREE Tools for Progress Monitoring:

Here is a simple free progress monitoring form you can use to easily track student progress in any skill, and a motivating free fluency progress tracker that students love to fill out themselves to track their reading fluency!

Formal Progress Monitoring Tips

When you’re trying to balance a bazillion other things on top of regular and consistent progress monitoring, life can get super stressful. The pressure to do it consistently and to measure the right skill is hard. Here are a few tips to make it easier.

Tips for Easier Progress Monitoring:

1. Make it quick!

It only has to be a few questions , not an entire test. Depending on the skill, it can just be 5 or so quick questions–- I like 5 because it gives easy 20% intervals for scoring.

2. Make it simple.

For phonics , it can just be reading 5 words.
For phonemic awareness , it can just be doing the skill for 5 words.
For fluency, just read a paragraph.
Comprehension and vocabulary take a little more planning as they need pre-written and thought-out questions, but they can be with quick sentences/sentence sequences instead of entire passages.

3. Make it targeted.

Just choose ONE skill to assess. For effective progress monitoring, you really need to zero in on just one skill so you can clearly determine if the student has that specific skill mastered.

4. Make it aligned.

For that one skill you are assessing, make sure your test actually assesses that skill in exactly the way your objective states students will show mastery.

5. Make it consistent.

Use the same scale/measure for each administration. That way you can see accurate trends quickly at a glance.

6. Make it recorded.

It can just be a page for each student with several blank 2-row tables on it.
Write the date across the top and the score underneath.
When you move onto a new skill, start using a new table.
Be sure to label each table so you know what skill it goes with and what assessment you used!
OR, just download this FREE Progress Monitoring Form to record your data!

7. Make it easy.

I put assessment cards on a binder ring for each topic.
They range from easy skills to hard skills and there are several cards for each skill (with different words switched in).
To give the assessment, I just pull out the set I need and flip to the card the student is on.

Informal assessment can have so many variations, and can often be quick and easy.

Informal Assessments (it doesn’t have to be complicated)

Formative assessment does not have to be intimidating and overwhelming. It can be very simple, and you are most likely already doing it. Informal assessments in particular are very natural and easy to weave into your instruction.

To make the most of your informal assessments, let them INFORM your teaching.

Use them as a gauge to spend more time, move on, or switch gears during a lesson.
Use them to quickly identify students who are struggling with the lesson.
Use them as a way to help students be accountable and engaged in their learning.

Your traditional “check for understanding” assessments you give during normal classroom lessons are perfect examples of informal assessments. They are for the teacher to use to guide instruction and monitor the entire class. They don’t have to be turned in to anyone and there is often no standardized way to give them (although some teams and schools might align their informal assessments).

Informal Formative Assessment Strategies

Here are some strategies you can use to quickly assess and gather informal data:

Observing engagement and participation in practice questions and activities
Walking around and recording observations as students work
Talking/listening to students
Collecting and checking student work

*See the next 2 sections for specific ideas of informal assessments!

Formative assessments can be given at multiple points throughout the day.

WHEN to Give Formative Assessments

Here are some formative assessment examples you might use at different points in learning.

DURING a lesson:

Students self-check after a practice question and signal if they got it correct
Students show their responses to practice questions
Students give a signal for whether they understand or not (thumbs up or down under their chin)
Students discuss with a partner (the teacher walks around and listens)
Teacher walks around while students do a practice question and observes student work

AFTER a lesson:

Worksheets or activities the teacher collects and checks
Conversations with the teacher
Walk around while students are working and observe/take notes
Self-check routines (students grade their own work)

Formal Progress Monitoring:

Strategic and regular assessments are given to track student progress on a particular skill
Intentional, regular, and scheduled time is set aside to take these quick assessments

Formative assessment examples can include self-assessment signals, written answers, verbal discussion, or observation.

Formative Assessment Examples: EASY Assessments

Real life is busy and chaotic, and sometimes you just need an easy way to monitor progress! These are all examples of practical and easy informal formative assessments that can help you quickly get a gauge and feel for how the class is doing as a whole, and keep an eye on students who might be struggling in that topic.

Formative Assessment Examples:

Students show a thumbs up or thumbs down under their chin during a lesson (to answer a yes/no question or to self-assess if they understand or not).
Students write answers on whiteboards and show the teacher their answer.
Students just think the answer in their head, then on the teacher’s signal they turn to a neighbor and tell each other what they think the answer is and why.
Have students whisper the answer into their hand, then “hold it”, and on the count of 3 say it out loud.
Students can show the answer on their fingers (counting sounds/syllables in words, assigning each answer choice a number, etc.).
Students have a red, yellow, and green card. They can hold up the color that corresponds with the answer, or use it to self-assess if they understand or not.
OR, they can have the cards in a pile at their desk and have the top color show how well they are understanding.
Have students give themselves a self-assessment score (1-3, yes/no, etc.) on a sticky note, write their name on the back, and stick it on the board.
On a small piece of paper have students answer one question and hand it to the teacher before they walk out the door.
OR for accurate verbal assessments for reading (like explained in this post on the best assessments for reading ), have them read a few words you point to before they walk out the door (like in the exit tickets pictured in the section above this one).
Students answer a question on a sticky note , write their name on the back, and stick it in a pile on the teacher’s desk (or have their name on top and the answer on the bottom for more anonymity).

These are all ideas for assessments that will guide your instruction, but not necessarily monitor individual student progress. For that, you will want to use a more formal progress monitoring system like these progress monitoring flip cards .

FREE Reading Intervention Cheat Sheet

With all of this said, formative assessment is only valuable if you are using it ALONGSIDE quality reading intervention . For some quick tips on how to identify student needs and some research-based and targeted reading activities, download this FREE Reading Intervention Cheat Sheet !

You can also check out my Ultimate List of Reading Intervention Activities for tons of hands-on and engaging activities to do with your students.

These reading intervention strategies and ideas will help your struggling readers! Click here to download it for free!

Hopefully, these formative assessment examples helped you understand all of the different types of formative assessment and see the value in using formative assessment vs summative. Progress monitoring and informal assessments help you keep a gauge on student learning and adjust your teaching so you are meeting your students’ needs. And they don’t have to be overwhelming! Real-life formative assessments can be quick and simple while still being powerful.

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Teachers' Essential Guide to Formative Assessment

Topics: Tech & Learning Assessment Classroom Media & Tools

How can I use formative assessment to plan instruction and help students drive their own learning?

What is formative assessment?

What makes a good formative assessment, how should i use formative assessment results, how do i know what type of formative assessment to use, what are the benefits of using an edtech tool for 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. Like we consider our formative years when we draw conclusions about ourselves, a formative assessment is where we begin to draw conclusions about our students' learning.

Formative assessment moves can take many forms and generally target skills or content knowledge that is relatively narrow in scope (as opposed to summative assessments, which assess broader sets of knowledge or skills). Common examples of formative assessments include exit tickets, fist-to-five check-ins, teacher-led question-and-answer sessions or games, completed graphic organizers, and practice quizzes.

In short, formative assessment is an essential part of all teaching and learning because it enables teachers to identify and target misunderstandings as they happen, and to adjust instruction to ensure that all students are keeping pace with the learning goals. As described by the NCTE position paper Formative Assessment That Truly Informs Instruction , formative assessment is a "constantly occurring process, a verb, a series of events in action, not a single tool or a static noun."

As mentioned above, formative assessments can take many forms. The most useful formative assessments share some common traits:

They assess skills and content that have been derived from the backward planning process . They seek to assess the key learning milestones in the unit or learning sequence.
They are actionable . They are designed so that student responses either clearly demonstrate mastery of the skills and content, or they show exactly where mastery is lacking or misunderstanding is occurring.
When possible, they are student-centered . Using an assessment where students measure themselves or their peers, or where they're prompted to reflect on their results, puts students in charge of their own learning. It allows students to consider their own progress and determine positive next steps. Unfortunately, student-centered formative assessments don't always yield the easiest and most actionable information for teachers, so their benefits have to be weighed against other factors.

Formative assessments are generally used for planning future instruction and for helping students drive their own learning. In terms of future instruction, how you use assessment data most depends on what kind of results you get.

If 80% or more demonstrate mastery , you'll likely want to proceed according to plan with subsequent lessons. For individual students not demonstrating mastery, you'll want to find ways to interject extra support. This might mean a differentiated assignment, a guided lesson during independent work time, or support outside of class.
If between 50% and 80% demonstrate mastery , you'll need to use class time to have structured differentiation. You'll need to build this into the next lesson(s) if it isn't already planned. This means different activities or guided instruction for different groups of students. Students who've demonstrated mastery could engage in an extension activity or additional practice, or serve as support for other students. Students still attempting mastery could receive additional guided practice or additional instructional materials like multimedia resources or smaller "chunks" of content.
If fewer than 50% demonstrate mastery , you'll need to do some whole-class reteaching. There are many approaches and concrete strategies for reteaching. Check out this article from Robert Marzano as well this blog post from BetterLesson for ideas.

The above recommendations are general rules of thumb, but your school or district may have specific guidelines to follow around teaching and reteaching. Make sure to consult them first.

Also, it's important to remember that building differentiation into the structure of your class and unit design from the beginning is the best way to make use of formative assessment results. Whether this means a blended or flipped classroom or activity centers, structuring in small-group, student-directed learning activities from the outset will make you more willing—and better prepared—to use formative assessment regularly and effectively in your class.

This is perhaps the most difficult question when it comes to formative assessment. There are so many different methods— just check out this list from Edutopia -- that it's easy to get lost in the sea of options. When it comes to choosing, the most important question is: What type of skill or content are you seeking to measure?

Content knowledge ("define," "identify," "differentiate") is generally the easiest to assess. For less rigorous objectives like these, a simple fist-to-five survey or exit ticket can work well. An edtech tool can also work well here, as many of them can score and aggregate multiple-choice responses automatically.
Higher-order thinking skills ("analyze," "synthesize," "elaborate") are generally more difficult and time-consuming to assess. For this, you'll likely use a different question type than multiple choice and need to allow more time for students to work. A good option here is to have students do a peer assessment using a rubric, which has the double benefit of allowing them to reflect on their own learning and cutting down the time you need to spend assessing the work. This can be done through an LMS or another project-based learning app , or through old-school paper and pencil; it just depends on your preference. Because students—and adults, too—often don't know what they don't know, self-assessments may be less accurate and less actionable for these types of skills.
Process-oriented skills ("script," "outline," "list the steps") also tend to be more difficult to assess. Graphic organizers can work well here, allowing teachers (or peer reviewers) to see how students arrived at their results. STEM apps for higher-order thinking and coding apps can also make this assessment information more accessible.

As mentioned above, one of the big benefits of using a tool for formative assessment is that it allows teachers to more efficiently use their time. Apps like Quizlet and Formative use a quiz format to provide real-time feedback to both students and teachers, and—n their premium versions—provide aggregate qualitative and quantitative assessment data. Other apps, like Kahoot! or Quizizz , provide these features with the added engagement of game-based competition . Apps like Flip (video-based) and Edulastic (tracks against standards) provide assessment data with other additional perks. Check out our list of top tech tools for formative assessment to see a range of options.

Finally, if you're already regularly teaching with technology , using an edtech tool fits seamlessly into the daily activities your students already know how to do. It can be an independent activity that students do as part of a blended classroom, or an outside-of-class activity that's part of a flipped classroom. In this context, both students and teachers will get the most out of the time-saving and student-centered benefits that edtech tools provide.

As an education consultant, Jamie created curriculum and professional development content for teachers. Prior to consulting, Jamie was senior manager of educator professional learning programs at Common Sense and taught middle school English in Oakland, California. For the 2016–2017 school year, Jamie received an Excellence in Teaching award and was one of three finalists for Teacher of the Year in Oakland Unified School District. While teaching, Jamie also successfully implemented a $200,000 school-wide blended-learning program funded by the Rogers Family Foundation and led professional development on a wide range of teaching strategies. Jamie holds a bachelor's degree in philosophy from Eugene Lang College and a master's degree in philosophy and education from Teacher' College at Columbia University. Jamie currently lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil with his 4-year-old son, Malcolm, and his partner, Marijke.

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Zest for learning… into the rainforest of teaching.

Revisiting Dylan Wiliam’s Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

In many of Dylan Wiliam’s talks and publications he references five ‘key strategies’ that support the implementation of effective formative assessment. The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s.

The five strategies were expressed as early as 2005:

Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions
Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning
Providing feedback that moves learners forward
Activating students as learning resources for one another
Activating students as owners of their own learning

Leahy, Lyon, Thompson and Wiliam (2005).

Very commonly, Wiliam presents these ideas in this helpful table, linking the strategies to core assessment concepts:

In my work as a consultant and teacher trainer, I give a lot of ‘evidence-informed’ advice to teachers. Of late, this has been influenced largely by discussions about a knowledge-rich curriculum and my reading of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction, cognitive load theory, and various other papers linking cognitive psychology to classroom practice.

However, it occurred to me recently that most of this overlaps entirely with Wiliam’s five strategies and that is what I want to explore here. To some extent, schools and teachers often feel they have have ‘done AfL to death’ in countless CPD sessions over the last 15 years. Time was when you couldn’t get a job unless you said ‘AfL’ about 12 times in an interview. Sadly, my sense is that the wisdom at the heart of Wiliam’s ideas about responsive teaching/formative assessment gets washed out either a) by the delusion that the strategies are already embedded in day-to-day practice or b) by the sense that this is a box ticked and people are really ready to move to the new thing. Truth be told, a lot of ‘AfL’ was and is a mile away from the formative assessment practice Wiliam is talking about.

Essentially, I feel that, among the important things every teacher should know, the five strategies should be there, part of the core curriculum for teacher development. Here’s how I see it all connecting:

1.Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions

Wiliam says ‘if you don’t know where you’re going, you’ll never get there’. This is largely about curriculum planning. I read ‘learning intentions’ as meaning: what do we want all students to know and be able to do? In the detail, this means spelling out what knowledge – in all its forms – they should have and how to apply this knowledge in new contexts. It chimes perfectly with the wave of work being done around curriculum design. It also resonates with the strand of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction around sequencing concepts, providing models and appropriate scaffolding.

It also means ‘what does excellence look like?’. This connects to ideas about assessment and comparative judgement and teachers knowing the standards. Significantly, the implication from Wiliam is that in ‘clarifying, understanding and sharing’ – teachers, students and their peers all need to know both the knowledge requirements and the criteria for excellence in any performed task. This goes far, far beyond writing a mandatory one-line LO on the board at the start of every lesson! (Aarrghh!). It suggests a lot of very explicit exposition and discussion about the target knowledge and the features of any endeavour that constitute ever increasing degrees of success.

This, in turn, feeds into ideas about self-regulation and metacognition. Successful learners will be good at self-regulation, planning and monitoring their progress towards learning goals in a deliberate self-directed manner. Knowing the learning intentions very well is essential for that process to work.

So the links here are numerous: curriculum, knowledge, standards, self-regulation, scaffolding, modelling.

2. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and activities that elicit evidence of learning

In some ways, this ‘strategy’ is a one-line summary of most of the rest of Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction . ‘Discussions, tasks and activities’ covers a lot of possibilities. At the centre of it is the idea of ‘responsive teaching’. Instructional teaching has to be highly interactive so that teachers are getting feedback from their students about how well their schemas for the material in hand are forming and how fluent they are becoming retrieving and using what they’ve learned. The challenge for teachers is to involve as many students as possible which leads to the need for good questioning routines and good knowledge-check routines where the ratio of student involvement is high and the information received has a good diagnostic component.

Rosenshine talks about the need for checking for understanding and asking lots of questions in a probing style. Wiliam focuses on question design – including good diagnostic multiple choice questions – and the role of all-student response techniques.

Links: Rosenshine’s Principles of Instruction. Shimamura’s ‘Generate-Evaluate’ model. Ideas about retrieval practice. Nuthall’s ideas about ‘hidden lives’ and the idea that we can’t be remotely confident about learning taking place until we check – now, and again later.

3. Providing feedback that moves learners forward

Feedback is a thorny issue, woven into discussions about the use of formative and summative assessment, marking and workload, grading and the value of data as a tool to improve learner outcomes. The key in Wiliam’s work is the emphasis on moving learners forward . It’s this thinking that informed the ideas I expressed in this ‘ feedback as actions ‘ post.

Some of the key messages that Wiliam offers in relation to feedback that I cite very often are:

Feedback is only successful if students’ learning improves – and this depends on their capacity to understand it and inclination to accept and act on it. It’s got an interpersonal, motivational element that can’t be brushed aside. Giving feedback isn’t a purely technical, objective task – although it does have to suggest actions students can actually take rather than offering a nebulous retrospective critique.
The goal is to change the students’ capacity to produce better work, not just to improve their work. Austin’s Butterfly is wonderful – because it shows what effective feedback can achieve – but Austin has only truly benefitted if, later, he is more able to ‘look like a scientist’ or draw beautiful butterflies without feedback: he needs to be able to generate his own feedback and become more independent.

This links formative assessment to metacognition and self-regulation and Rosenshine’s ideas about moving from guided to independent practice. If we’re still reliant on external feedback to tell us if we’ve succeeded (SatNav style), then we’ve still got a long way to go. Effective learners can link their work to the success criteria and generate their own ongoing self-correcting feedback narrative.

Links: Ethic of excellence, Rosenshine guided to independent practice, self-regulation.

4. Activating students as learning resources for one another

I think this is the feature of Wiliam’s five strategies that deserves more attention. All too often teachers create major bottlenecks by forcing all classroom interactions to pass through them. However, if teachers develop strong routines where students support each other’s learning in a serious structured manner, then the ratio, quality and frequency of student interactions with the knowledge in hand can increase significantly. We can’t have a dialogue with every student at once but they can all be involved in meaningful dialogues with each other to support the process of working out ‘where the learner is’ and ‘how to get to where the learner is going’. This is where disciplined ‘ think pair share ‘ becomes so powerful.

Wiliam cites Slavin in showing that well-designed collaborative learning can yield significant gains – but it has to be done such that everyone is learning. There are so many ways to do this e.g students checking their partners’ answers using all manner of quizzing formats and generative processes and elaborative-interrogative questions (why? how?). Pairs are probably the most efficient and effective use of this strategy – because of the ease of switching in and out of the interactions. If one person in a pair acts as the verifier for the other, using exemplars, fact sheets, mark schemes as a reference, the extent of retrieval practice and feedback can be increased hugely. Another example might be using structured dialogues for practising the use of language or rehearsing explanations and arguments. Provided that there is a strong process for evaluating students’ responses for accuracy and quality, a high volume of peer-to-peer interactivity is powerful.

Links: Hattie’s ‘reciprocal teaching’, Shimamura’s ‘think it, say it, teach it’, Slavin’s collaborative learning, Sumeracki and Weinstein on elaborative interrogative questions and retrieval practice.

5. Activating students as owners of their own learning

In all honesty, I find that implementation of the strategy behind this feel-good-phrase, often falls into the dust of ‘noble intent’ rather than delivering something tangible. However, it is actually highly actionable and links directly to many other ideas. ‘Owning your own learning’ is at the heart of strong self-regulation and metacognition: setting learning goals, planning, monitoring and evaluating success in tasks links to those goals; forming effective schemata that take account of big-picture questions and themes that inform subsequent conscious rehearsal and elaboration. However, these ‘goals’ are not broad brush life goals; they are learning goals – the next steps in improving writing fluency, science knowledge, confidence with maths and languages, physical fitness etc.

The point is that these characteristics of effective learning can be fostered by setting up good routines and expectations. Teachers can help students to know where they are going and where they are on the curriculum journey. This can be supported by:

giving students access to long-term topic plans, the syllabus, the wide scope overview before diving down into the details;
setting out milestones in the progress journey so that students can take their bearings and plan their own next steps through appropriate forms of practice, becoming increasingly independent.
setting out clear relational models for conceptual schema building – as per Shimamura’s Relate in MARGE .
providing exemplars of performance at various levels of success up to a high/exceptional level so students can compare their own work against a scale and see for themselves where they are and what short-run learning goals might be achievable to move forward.

If a student knows for themself what they need to do in order to improve and gains the experience of being able to achieve success through applying effort to these self-determined goals, then they begin a positive upward spiral of confidence building, growth mindset-inducing, self-regulation that fuels even more success.

Links: Rosenshine: practice; Shimamura: Relate; Growth mindset; self-regulation.

To some extent I feel that the issue has been that ‘AfL’ or even ‘formative assessment’ has been too broad a term; too much of a catch-all, thereby allowing various degrees of corruption and dilution to take root. I think that it’s when you get into understanding and deploying the five separate strategies that it finds form. That’s the understanding of formative assessment that teachers need. It’s powerful stuff, right there, where it’s been for years.

Key References:

Wiliam, D., & Thompson, M. (2007). Integrating assessment with instruction: what will it take to make it work? In C. A. Dwyer (Ed.), The future of assessment: shaping teaching and learning (pp. 53-82). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Wilam, D (2011) Embedded Formative Assessment. Solution Tree Press.

Formative Assessment of Teaching

What is formative assessment of teaching.

How do you know if your teaching is effective? How can you identify areas where your teaching can improve? What does it look like to assess teaching?

Formative Assessment

Formative assessment of teaching consists of different approaches to continuously evaluate your teaching. The insight gained from this assessment can support revising your teaching strategies, leading to better outcomes in student learning and experiences. Formative assessment can be contrasted with summative assessment, which is usually part of an evaluative decision-making process. The table below outlines some of the key differences between formative and summative assessment:

Evaluation of Teaching
Type of Assessment	Formative	Summative
	Gather evidence of teaching to guide the instructor towards growth and improvement.	Gather evidence of teaching to make a decision about the instructor being evaluated.
	To reveal the instructor’s current strengths and areas for improvement.	To judge the instructor’s case for promotion, tenure, or other decision of consequence.
	A check-in that allows you to adjust and correct your actions.	A final exam in a course where your performance is judged.
	May generate pieces of evidence over time that can later be used as part of a summative assessment.	May use approaches similar to formative assessment with a different purpose and audience.

By participating in formative assessment, instructors connect with recent developments in the space of teaching and learning, as well as incorporate new ideas into their practice. Developments may include changes in the students we serve, changes in our understanding of effective teaching, and changes in expectations of the discipline and of higher education as a whole.

Formative assessment of teaching ultimately should guide instructors towards using more effective teaching practices. What does effectiveness mean in terms of teaching?

Effectiveness in Teaching

Effective teaching can be defined as teaching that leads to the intended outcomes in student learning and experiences. In this sense, there is no single perfect teaching approach. Effective teaching looks will depend on the stated goals for student learning and experiences. A course that aims to build student confidence in statistical analysis and a course that aims to develop student writing could use very different teaching strategies, and still both be effective at accomplishing their respective goals.

Assessing student learning and experiences is critical to determining if teaching is truly effective in its context. This assessment can be quite complex, but it is doable. In addition to measuring the impacts of your teaching, you may also consider evaluating your teaching as it aligns with best practices for evidence-based teaching especially in the disciplinary and course context or aligns with your intended teaching approach. The table below outlines these three approaches to assessing the effectiveness of your teaching:

Evidence of Effective Teaching
Approach	Student Learning Experiences	Alignment with Best Practices	Alignment with Intention
	Does my current course design or teaching strategy lead to students able to demonstrate my stated learning outcomes?	Does my current course design or teaching strategy align with what is recommended in my context (e.g. student level, class format/size, discipline)?	Does my current course design or teaching strategy align with my teaching philosophy and values?
	Measures of student learning are the most authentic and accurate metrics for teaching efficacy. Effective teaching will increase student learning from before to after a course, and to a higher extent compared to less effective methods.	Research has identified several strategies more likely to be effective at accomplishing certain student outcomes. Certain instructional formats/approaches may help accomplish particular skill learning objectives.	The planned teaching approach may not actually be reflected in practice. Observations and student experiences can reveal a mismatch between reality and intentions.
	Direct evaluation of student work through papers, projects, assignments, exam questions Student surveys for intended experiences or changes in student beliefs/attitudes	Evaluation of course design components using instructor rubrics Evaluation of live teaching practice using classroom observation protocols	Student surveys for perceptions of class environment or instructor practice Evaluation of live teaching practice using classroom observation protocols

What are some strategies that I might try?

There are multiple ways that instructors might begin to assess their teaching. The list below includes approaches that may be done solo, with colleagues, or with the input of students. Instructors may pursue one or more of these strategies at different points in time. With each possible strategy, we have included several examples of the strategy in practice from a variety of institutions and contexts.

Teaching Portfolios

Teaching portfolios are well-suited for formative assessment of teaching, as the portfolio format lends itself to documenting how your teaching has evolved over time. Instructors can use their teaching portfolios as a reflective practice to review past teaching experiences, what worked and what did not.

Teaching portfolios consist of various pieces of evidence about your teaching such as course syllabi, outlines, lesson plans, course evaluations, and more. Instructors curate these pieces of evidence into a collection, giving them the chance to highlight their own growth and focus as educators. While student input may be incorporated as part of the portfolio, instructors can contextualize and respond to student feedback, giving them the chance to tell their own teaching story from a more holistic perspective.

Teaching portfolios encourage self-reflection, especially with guided questions or rubrics to review your work. In addition, an instructor might consider sharing their entire teaching portfolio or selected materials for a single course with colleagues and engaging in a peer review discussion.

Examples and Resources:

Teaching Portfolio - Career Center

Developing a Statement of Teaching Philosophy and Teaching Portfolio - GSI Teaching & Resource Center

Self Assessment - UCLA Center for Education, Innovation, and Learning in the Sciences

Advancing Inclusion and Anti-Racism in the College Classroom Rubric and Guide

Course Design Equity and Inclusion Rubric

Teaching Demos or Peer Observation

Teaching demonstrations or peer classroom observation provide opportunities to get feedback on your teaching practice, including communication skills or classroom management.

Teaching demonstrations may be arranged as a simulated classroom environment in front of a live audience who take notes and then deliver summarized feedback. Alternatively, demonstrations may involve recording an instructor teaching to an empty room, and this recording can be subjected to later self-review or peer review. Evaluation of teaching demos will often focus on the mechanics of teaching especially for a lecture-based class, e.g. pacing of speech, organization of topics, clarity of explanations.

In contrast, instructors may invite a colleague to observe an actual class session to evaluate teaching in an authentic situation. This arrangement gives the observer a better sense of how the instructor interacts with students both individually or in groups, including their approach to answering questions or facilitating participation. The colleague may take general notes on what they observe or evaluate the instructor using a teaching rubric or other structured tool.

Peer Review of Course Instruction

Preparing for a Teaching Demonstration - UC Irvine Center for Educational Effectiveness

Based on Peer Feedback - UCLA Center for Education, Innovation, and Learning in the Sciences

Teaching Practices Equity and Inclusion Rubric

Classroom Observation Protocol for Undergraduate STEM (COPUS)

Student Learning Assessments

Student learning can vary widely across courses or even between academic terms. However, having a clear benchmark for the intended learning objectives and determining whether an instructor’s course as implemented helps students to reach that benchmark can be an invaluable piece of information to guide your teaching. The method for measuring student learning will depend on the stated learning objective, but a well-vetted instrument can provide the most reliable data.

Recommended steps and considerations for using student learning assessments to evaluate your teaching efficacy include:

Identify a small subset of course learning objectives to focus on, as it is more useful to accurately evaluate one objective vs. evaluating many objectives inaccurately.

Find a well-aligned and well-developed measure for each selected course learning objective, such as vetted exam questions, rubrics, or concept inventories.

If relevant, develop a prompt or assignment that will allow students to demonstrate the learning objective to then be evaluated against the measure.

Plan the timing of data collection to enable useful comparison and interpretation.

Do you want to compare how students perform at the start of your course compared to the same students at the end of your course?

Do you want to compare how the same students perform before and after a specific teaching activity?

Do you want to compare how students in one term perform compared to students in the next term, after changing your teaching approach?

Implement the assignment/prompt and evaluate a subset or all of the student work according to the measure.

Reflect on the results and compare student performance measures.

Are students learning as a result of your teaching activity and course design?

Are students learning to the degree that you intended?

Are students learning more when you change how you teach?

This process can be repeated as many times as needed or the process can be restarted to instead focus on a different course learning objective.

List of Concept Inventories (STEM)

Best Practices for Administering Concept Inventories (Physics)

AAC&U VALUE Rubrics

Rubric Bank | Assessment and Curriculum Support Center - University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa

Rubrics - World Languages Resource Collection - Kennesaw State University

Student Surveys or Focus Groups

Surveys or focus groups are effective tools to better understand the student experience in your courses, as well as to solicit feedback on how courses can be improved. Hearing student voices is critical as students themselves can attest to how course activities made them feel, e.g. whether they perceive the learning environment to be inclusive, or what topics they find interesting.

Some considerations for using student surveys in your teaching include:

Surveys collect individual and anonymous input from as many students as possible.

Surveys can gather both quantitative and qualitative data.

Surveys that are anonymous avoid privileging certain voices over others.

Surveys can enable students to share about sensitive experiences that they may be reluctant to discuss publicly.

Surveys that are anonymous may lend to negative response bias.

Survey options at UC Berkeley include customized course evaluation questions or anonymous surveys on bCourses, Google Forms, or Qualtrics.

Some considerations for using student focus groups in your teaching include:

Focus groups leverage the power of group brainstorming to identify problems and imagine possible solutions.

Focus groups can gather both rich and nuanced qualitative data.

Focus groups with a skilled facilitator tend to have more moderated responses given the visibility of the discussion.

Focus groups take planning, preparation, and dedicated class time.

Focus group options at UC Berkeley include scheduling a Mid-semester Inquiry (MSI) to be facilitated by a CTL staff member.

Instructions for completing question customization for your evaluations as an instructor

Course Evaluations Question Bank

Student-Centered Evaluation Questions for Remote Learning

Based on Student Feedback - UCLA Center for Education, Innovation, and Learning in the Sciences

How Can Instructors Encourage Students to Complete Course Evaluations and Provide Informative Responses?

Student Views/Attitudes/Affective Instruments - ASBMB

Student Skills Inventories - ASBMB

How might I get started?

Self-assess your own course materials using one of the available rubrics listed above.

Schedule a teaching observation with CTL to get a colleague’s feedback on your teaching practices and notes on student engagement.

Schedule an MSI with CTL to gather directed student feedback with the support of a colleague.

Have more questions? Schedule a general consultation with CTL or send us your questions by email ( [email protected] )!

References:

Evaluating Teaching - UCSB Instructional Development

Documenting Teaching - UCSC Center for Innovations in Teaching and Learning

Other Forms of Evaluation - UCLA Center for Education, Innovation, and Learning in the Sciences

Evaluation Of Teaching Committee on Teaching, Academic Senate

Report of the Academic Council Teaching Evaluation Task Force

Teaching Quality Framework Initiative Resources - University of Colorado Boulder

Benchmarks for Teaching Effectiveness - University of Kansas Center for Teaching Excellence

Teaching Practices Instruments - ASBMB

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What Is Formative Assessment and How Should Teachers Use It?

Check student progress as they learn, and adapt to their needs.

Assessments are a regular part of the learning process, giving both teachers and students a chance to measure their progress. There are several common types of assessments, including pre-assessment (diagnostic) and post-assessment (summative). Some educators, though, argue that the most important of all are formative assessments. So, what is formative assessment, and how can you use it effectively with your students? Read on to find out.

What is formative assessment?

Frayer model describing characteristics of formative assessment

Source: KNILT

Formative assessment takes place while learning is still happening. In other words, teachers use formative assessment to gauge student progress throughout a lesson or activity. This can take many forms (see below), depending on the teacher, subject, and learning environment. Here are some key characteristics of this type of assessment:

Low-Stakes (or No-Stakes)

Most formative assessments aren’t graded, or at least aren’t used in calculating student grades at the end of the grading period. Instead, they’re part of the daily give-and-take between teachers and students. They’re often quick and used immediately after teaching a specific objective.

Planned and Part of the Lesson

Rather than just being quick check-for-understanding questions many teachers ask on the fly, formative assessments are built into a lesson or activity. Teachers consider the skills or knowledge they want to check on, and use one of many methods to gather information on student progress. Students can also use formative assessments among themselves for self-assessment and peer feedback.

Used to Make Adjustments to Teaching Plans

After gathering student feedback, teachers use that feedback to make adjustments to their lessons or activities as needed. Students who self-assess then know what areas they still need help with and can ask for assistance.

How is formative assessment different from other assessments?

Chart comparing formative and summative assessment

Source: Helpful Professor

There are three general types of assessment: diagnostic, formative, and summative. Diagnostic assessments are used before learning to determine what students already do and do not know. Think pre-tests and other activities students attempt at the beginning of a unit. Teachers may use these to make some adjustments to their planned lessons, skipping or just recapping what students already know.

Diagnostic assessments are the opposite of summative assessments, which are used at the end of a unit or lesson to determine what students have learned. By comparing diagnostic and summative assessments, teachers and learners can get a clearer picture of how much progress they’ve made.

Formative assessments take place during instruction. They’re used throughout the learning process and help teachers make on-the-go adjustments to instruction and activities as needed.

Why is formative assessment important in the classroom?

These assessments give teachers and students a chance to be sure that meaningful learning is really happening. Teachers can try new methods and gauge their effectiveness. Students can experiment with different learning activities, without fear that they’ll be punished for failure. As Chase Nordengren of the NWEA puts it :

“Formative assessment is a critical tool for educators looking to unlock in-depth information on student learning in a world of change. Rather than focusing on a specific test, formative assessment focuses on practices teachers undertake during learning that provide information on student progress toward learning outcomes.”

It’s all about increasing your ability to connect with students and make their learning more effective and meaningful.

What are some examples of formative assessment?

Chart showing what formative assessment is and what it isn't

Source: Writing City

There are so many ways teachers can use formative assessments in the classroom! We’ve highlighted a few perennial favorites, but you can find a big list of 25 creative and effective formative assessments options here .

Exit Tickets

At the end of a lesson or class, pose a question for students to answer before they leave. They can answer using a sticky note, online form, or digital tool.

Kahoot Quizzes

Kids and teachers adore Kahoot! Kids enjoy the gamified fun, while teachers appreciate the ability to analyze the data later to see which topics students understand well and which need more time.

We love Flip (formerly Flipgrid) for helping teachers connect with students who hate speaking up in class. This innovative (and free!) tech tool lets students post selfie videos in response to teacher prompts. Kids can view each other’s videos, commenting and continuing the conversation in a low-key way.

What is your favorite way to use formative assessments in the classroom? Come exchange ideas in the WeAreTeachers HELPLINE group on Facebook .

Plus, check out the best tech tools for student assessment ..

Wondering what formative assessment is and how to use it in the classroom? Learn about this ongoing form of evaluation here.

25+ Formative assessment ideas for the classroom.

25 Formative Assessment Options Your Students Will Actually Enjoy

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Formative Assessment

Assessment comes in two forms: formative and summative . Formative assessment occurs during the learning process, focuses on improvement (rather than evaluation) and is often informal and low-stakes.

Adjustments in Instruction

Formative assessment allows instructors to gain valuable feedback—what students have learned, how well they can articulate concepts, what problems they can solve. Instructors can then make changes to increase effectiveness, which can lead to substantial learning gains (Black and Wiliam, 1998).

The Problem of Student Over-Confidence

Formative assessment also helps students accurately assess their own knowledge, which is crucial for learning. Especially for lower-performing students, a significant gap exists between what students think they know and what they actually know (Bell and Volckmann, 2011). This confirms what in psychology is called the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less competent or skilled an individual is, the more likely he or she is to be overconfident in his or her abilities (Kruger and Dunning, 1999). Overconfidence has a strong negative effect on learning. Students who are overconfident have significantly smaller normalized learning gains than students who were more realistic in their assessments (Mathabathe and Potgieter, 2014).

Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs)

Classroom Assessment Techniques are a specific set of formative assessments designed to give the instructor and the students a clear picture of what they know. The term CATs was popularized in Angelo and Cross’ book Classroom Assessment Techniques: A Handbook for College Teachers . The following are a few of the most popular CATs that, because of their simplicity and flexibility, can be used in almost any subject:

What was the most important thing you learned during this class?
What important question remains unanswered?
What was the muddiest point of the class?
What made this point so difficult to comprehend?
One-Sentence Summary. Choosing a single topic addressed during a class session, ask the students to answer the question: who does what, to whom, when, where, why, and how ?
Student-Generated Test Questions. Have students generate test questions and practice answering their questions thoroughly. Additionally, integrating student response systems such as Clickers in the classroom have been proven to result in increases in a number of significant areas including: students' ability to assess their learning, the amount of pages students read before class, their overall understanding of the material, and their exam scores (Hedgcock & Rouwenhorst, 2014).

For a pre-constructed assessment worksheet see Fast Feedback Form or find additional CATs here: https://vcsa.ucsd.edu/_files/assessment/resources/50_cats.pdf

Retrieval Practices Enhance Learning

Formative assessment can also help students learn material. Although students may prefer “cramming” before an exam by re-reading texts and notes, they remember more and have a deeper understanding of material when they must mentally retrieve it regularly, at spaced intervals interleaved with other unrelated material. From short writing exercises to low-stakes quizzes to answering polling questions (e.g., with Clickers), formative assessment can facilitate these retrieval practices that enhance learning (Brown, Roediger III, & McDaniel, 2014).

Angelo, T. A., & Cross, K.P. (1993). Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers . Second Edition. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers .

Bell, P., & Volckmann, D. (2011). Knowledge surveys in general chemistry: Confidence, overconfidence, and performance. Journal of Chemical Education, 88 (11), 1469-1476.

Black, P., & Wiliam, D. (2006). Assessment and classroom learning. Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy and Practice, 5 (1), 7-74.

Brown, P., & Roediger III, H., & McDaniel, M. (2014). Make it stick: The science of successful learning. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press.

Hedgcock, W., & Rouwenhorst, R. (2014). Clicking their way to success: Using student response systems as a tool for feedback. Journal for Advancement of Marketing Education, 22 (2), 16-25.

Kruger, J., & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 77(6), 1121-1134.

Mathabathe, K. C., & Potgieter, M. (2014). Metacognitive monitoring and learning gain in foundation chemistry. Chemical Education Research and Practice, 15 (1), 94 104.

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6 Types Of Assessments And How To Use Them Effectively To Inform Your Teaching

Alyssa Broussard

Education makes use of many types of assessment. While your mind may jump to the word test when you hear assessment, this is not always the case. Tests are one type of assessment, but they reach far beyond this one method.

Assessments can be a great indicator of student performance, understanding, and mastery. These measures guide teaching practices. Without assessments, teachers must assume students understand everything perfectly. While that would be great if that were the case for every lesson, this is unlikely.

This article explores six types of assessment and provides examples and best teaching practices for carrying out each assessment method.

What are the types of assessment in education?

Types of assessment refer to the wide variety of methods or tools that educators use to evaluate, measure, and document the academic readiness, learning progress, skill acquisition, or educational needs of students.

Popular examples of assessments include:

Exit Tickets
Think-Pair-Share
Research Papers

Each of these assessments can be categorized into subcategories. The two most commonly known are formative and summative assessment .

Assessment falls into four further subcategories:

Diagnostic assessment
Ipsative assessment
Criterion-referenced assessment
Norm-referenced assessments

Supporting Disadvantaged Students to Succeed in Mat

A short guide with practical steps for supporting disadvantaged students to succeed in math assessments.

What is the purpose of using different types of assessments?

Just as different activities teach students different things, different assessments measure different things.

Continual progress monitoring of student performance through assessment is crucial. Teachers must ensure students understand foundational lessons to continue building from. This is best done when educators can identify the topics students struggle with.

It is a fair assumption that most lesson planning hinges on student progress. If a class is struggling on a unit or lesson, educators will likely try to help them achieve mastery rather than just carrying on. This is where the types of assessments become important.

A key component of many assessment types is student involvement. Of course, every assessment requires student participation. However, some require students to:

Reflect on their learning
Apply it in a new way
Set goals for themselves

Their willingness (or lack thereof) helps determine the impact of teacher interventions.

While some students are willing to be honest with their teachers and themselves, others are not so inclined. This could be for any number of reasons. If all assessment types relied on student reflection, you may not get the full picture of the student’s learning experience.

More traditional methods of assessments analyze student performance in high-stakes situations like end-of-the-year examinations. These tests can be a great measure of student mastery and knowledge retention.

However, students who are not good test takers, experience test anxiety or are having an off day may not perform in a way that demonstrates their mastery.

Utilizing different assessment methods helps educators receive a whole-student view, rather than defining a student by their performance in a single instance.

Below we look in more detail at different types of assessment and the value they bring to the classroom.

Formative assessments

Formative assessments monitor student learning while providing ongoing feedback. These assessments help teachers and students easily identify strengths and weaknesses in student performance.

Formative assessments are assessments for learning . They are low stakes and typically easier for students to complete.

Examples of formative assessments include:

Concept maps
Self-assessments

These assessments are low-stakes for students and teachers but provide valuable insight into student learning.

For example, imagine you are trying to teach your students factoring using the ‘FOIL’ method (First, Outer, Inner, Last) to multiply binomials. You’ve completed lessons on the acronym and gone through “I Do”, “We Do”, and “You Do”. Now it’s time to let your students demonstrate their knowledge.

Before wrapping up class for the day, you have them complete an exit ticket for the following problem:

(x+2)(2x+3)

While reviewing your students’ answers you find three common answers:

Answer 1: 2x²+7x+6
Answer 2: 2x²+4x+3x+6
Answer 3: 2x+7x+6

This provides assessment data which helps to pinpoint student struggles.

In answer two, students forgot to combine like terms. In answer three, the students forgot that multiplying x by x is not the same as multiplying x by one.

This simple assessment provides the insight needed to review foundational concepts that students need to progress through the rest of their math careers.

Without formative assessments, it can be difficult to identify these pain points. The frequency of formative assessment allows teachers to constantly check on student understanding and adjust teaching practices as needed.

All Third Space Learning one-on-one math tutoring sessions use formative assessment. Once tutors take students through the lesson using ‘follow me, your turn’ students complete the ‘check your understanding’ question independently. Tutors follow the student’s calculations and explanations of critical thinking in the interactive classroom to assess how well they are grasping the learning objective.

5th grade math tutoring designed by math experts

Summative assessments

Summative assessments are assessments of learning and student knowledge. These assessments evaluate student learning at the end of a set instructional period and often provide student grades.

Student performance on summative assessments is measured against other students or state and national standards.

Summative assessment strategies include:

Cumulative projects
Research papers
Final exams

Summative assessments help schools and educators assess student learning over the course of a unit, semester, and year.

Some schools choose to administer a pretest to compare student performance from the beginning of the year to the end, allowing educators to monitor individual student growth.

At the end of each Third Space Learning one-on-one math tutoring program, students complete a final summative assessment to see which learning objectives and gaps they have closed and any that are outstanding.

More types of assessments

Though summative and formative assessments are the most popular, there are several other types of assessment. These assessments further help educators identify student strengths and weaknesses, establish goals, and compare performance to students across the district – even across the country.

Diagnostic assessments

In addition to student feedback, diagnostic assessments provide teachers with a tool that helps measure student strengths and weaknesses. Their goal is to assess prior knowledge and establish a baseline for the student ahead of a new learning unit.

Common diagnostic assessment tools include:

K-W-L charts
Class discussions
Student interviews

Ipsative assessments

Using ipsative assessments is an impactful way to measure student progress and mastery. Rather than comparing student performance to other students or a standard benchmark, ipsative assessments demonstrate how much a student has learned over a period.

These assessments are highly effective with students as they are not comparing themselves to anyone else. They are simply trying to improve upon their performance.

Ipsative assessments are commonly executed through student portfolios and project-based learning.

Criterion-referenced assessments

A more universally used form of assessment, criterion-referenced assessments determine student mastery of set standards and learning objectives.

These assessments show educators how far or close students are to mastering the standards and objectives outlined for their grade level.

Criterion-referenced assessments do not measure student performance against others, only the standard. Predetermined values decide how students perform and demonstrate their mastery.

Common examples include pre and post-tests, chapter tests and end-of-the-year exams.

At Third Space Learning, students are only ever assessed using criterion-referenced assessments as individuals. Each assessment takes place against the current learning standard and whether they have met the standard or not.

Norm-referenced assessments

On the other hand, norm-referenced assessments compare and rank students to each other. Students are measured against what the exam board determines the estimated average performance is across different competencies.

From there, students receive a percentile based on their score. This percentile demonstrates how students perform compared to peers in their school, district, state, and country. These assessments are commonly seen in IQ tests, standardized tests, and any examination that provides students with a percentile ranking.

Impact of assessments

Each type of assessment impacts students, planning and the general classroom in one way or another. Here we look in more detail at how different types of assessment impacts student learning and teachers.

Student learning

Assessments are a fantastic way to hold students accountable for their learning. Knowing that there will be knowledge checks is a motivator for students to continue to develop their education.

At the same time, students must be met with assessments aligned to the standards and objectives they are expected to meet. As educators, it is critical to ensure that students are not faced with misaligned assessments.

Clearly identify the alignment between an assessment and learning goal is important to help student learning. Without alignment, students may lack a sense of attainment, which hinders motivation.

Additionally, when assessments align to the taught content properly, teachers can give students individualized feedback. Teachers and students can use this feedback for future studies, awareness, and focus points throughout the year.

Teacher use

Assessments provide invaluable insight into students’ minds. Assessments such as formative assessments and diagnostic assessments provide real-time feedback on student understanding allowing teachers to adjust and differentiate instruction .

For example, circling back to the earlier example of the FOIL method, now that you know the two common misunderstandings your students have, you can plan a variety of Tier 2 interventions or Tier 3 interventions .

This may look like conducting small group instruction with the two groups, to provide focused learning activities aimed to address misconceptions. If the majority of the class answered incorrectly, you could host a review lesson to avoid having to single any group of students out.

This is just one data point gathered using one type of assessment. For the most holistic view of student understanding, utilize a variety of assessments. This will help you gauge how your students are performing across time, rather than on one specific day. This is critical because of the many external factors we have to overcome in the classroom.

Consider test anxiety, for example. A student could ace every formative assessment and criterion-referenced assessment but perform poorly on a norm-referenced assessment. These assessments are commonly seen as higher stakes and can lead to a higher performance to self-worth correlation.

Any number of events can influence a student’s performance and it is the job of educators to remember and plan for that as best we can.

A variety of data allows teachers to best adjust teaching strategies to meet student needs.

Student achievement

Assessments are a portal into the student learning process. This means that all assessments have to be fair and valid, which is not always as easy as it seems. Mainly due to the fact that the content in many high-stakes assessments is not explicitly outlined.

Educators must ensure students are prepared as well as they can be. When designing in-classroom assessments, be sure that assessments are holding your students accountable for what is taught, explored, and reviewed.

By teaching and assessing students in a standards-and objectives-aligned way, true data can be shown to law and policymakers. This demonstrates where students are performing, what is achievable, and where we as a populous need to focus on and improve.

Assessments are a vital part of student education. The various types provide different insights into student performance throughout the school year and allow us to best adjust our teaching to meet the needs of our students. Through assessments and interventions, teachers can promote student learning and achievement, which helps empower generations of learners.

Formative, Summative and Diagnostic assessments are the three most commonly used assessment types. Formative assessments actively monitor student progress. They are low-stakes and lower effort. Summative assessments assess student knowledge at the end of a set learning period (unit, semester, school year, etc.). Diagnostic assessments assess prior knowledge and establish a baseline.

Six commonly used assessment methods are: – Formative assessment – Summative assessment – Diagnostic assessment – Ipsative assessment – Criterion-referenced assessment – Norm-referenced assessment

The most effective assessment type depends on what is assessed. Each assessment is impactful in its own way. When assessing student understanding of developing concepts, formative assessments are most effective. This assessment type allows educators to intervene earlier than others. In establishing a baseline of student knowledge, diagnostic assessment is most effective. If you are looking to evaluate a student’s performance, criterion-referenced and ipsative assessments are best. To assess student understanding over an extended period of time, norm-referenced and summative assessments are most effective.

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Assessments in Education: 5 Types You Should Know

Assessments in education refer to collecting and analyzing information to understand and improve student learning. Tests, essays, speeches, and projects are common ways teachers assess students to understand what they know and can do.

Stakeholders in education can use well-designed assessments to adjust instructions or teaching strategies and provide the right support for students. In addition, assessments affect several areas of education, including:

Instructional needs
Student grade level
Student placement and advancement
School funding

Why Assessments Are Important

Assessments play a crucial role in education, providing valuable insights into students’ knowledge, skills, and learning progress. Using assessments, teachers can determine whether the learning objectives of the course ― what students should know or be able to do by the end of a class ― have been met.

Here are a few key reasons assessments are important:

Helps student learning : Assessments help students determine whether they understand their course materials and what teachers teach.
Motivates students : Assessment results help students identify areas of strength and weakness so they can do better.
Improves teaching methods : Using assessments, teachers can readily gauge the effectiveness of their teaching methods and instructions and make adjustments where necessary.

The Purpose of Assessments

Here’s how The Edvocate , an educational advocacy and reform publication, summarizes the purpose of assessments in education: to gather students’ performance information to make judgments about their learning process.

While they may take different forms, assessments generally serve one of three purposes:

Assessment of learning : Determines whether students meet grade level standards through assessment processes like standardized tests, exams, and final projects.
Assessment for learning : Provides ongoing insights into students’ learning and enables teachers to adjust teaching strategies as they teach.
Assessment as learning : Actively encourages students’ involvement in learning by promoting problem-solving skills, goal-setting, and critical thinking.

Five Types of Assessments

Student shading answers with a pencil

Many recent studies, including this one , list formative, diagnostic, and summative assessments as the three basic kinds of assessments in education. In addition, several other assessment types serve various specific purposes and can inform instructional decisions. Here are five common assessment types and how they help students learn.

1. Formative Assessment

A formative assessment is an ongoing, interactive evaluation that gauges student learning throughout the instructional process. These assessments provide immediate feedback to teachers, allowing them to adjust teaching methodologies on the go to improve student learning.

Some examples of formative assessments include:

Class discussions
Group activities
Spontaneous question and answer sessions
Periodic student feedback

While these assessments can provide instant feedback and help students stay engaged, they can be time-consuming and subjective. To make this type of classroom assessment work, teachers should set clear expectations, create a supportive classroom, and use helpful technology tools.

2. Diagnostic Assessment

A diagnostic assessment is like a sneak peek before the learning process begins. Teachers can use these assessments at the beginning of a course or unit to assess students’ prior knowledge and skills. This way, they understand what students already know and where they might struggle, and then tailor instructions accordingly.

Examples of diagnostic assessments include:

Concept maps
Questionnaire, survey, or checklists
Self-evaluation

A diagnostic assessment task is great for providing students with targeted help but may be time-consuming and require careful analysis. Teachers can use effective strategies to make the most of the results, such as grouping students based on their needs and designing individualized learning plans.

3. Summative Assessment

Summative assessments occur at the end of a unit, course, or academic period. These assessments measure students’ overall knowledge and understanding of a subject.

Common examples of summative assessments include:

Final examinations
Presentations
Term papers
Research projects

Teachers can use these assessments for accountability purposes and to comprehensively evaluate student performance. However, research shows that summative assessments may place undue stress on students and sometimes do not capture the complete picture of learning, especially if the assessments don’t follow best practices. To prepare students for summative assessments, teachers can provide study guides, review sessions, and practice tests.

4. Norm-Referenced Assessment

Norm-referenced assessments compare individual student performance to a larger group. These assessments determine how well a student performs relative to their peers. Since the student assessment typically reports scores in percentiles, norm-referenced assessments are useful for evaluating student performance in relation to a specific population or standard.

Some examples of norm-referenced assessments include:

Benchmark assessments
Standardized tests
College entrance examinations
Reading level assessments (for example, the Developmental Reading Assessment or the Fountas and Pinnell Benchmark Assessment System)

While these assessments can help teachers see how individual students are doing compared to others, they may not provide detailed insights into individual strengths and weaknesses. To make the most of this type of assessment, teachers can use the results to compare the average grade of their students against those in other classes or schools. This way, they can identify relative strengths and areas for improvement and make informed instructional decisions.

5. Ipsative Assessment

Ipsative assessments measure current student performance against previous results to track student achievement over time. These assessments often use a two-stage framework that allows students to retake exercises, student work, or tests, encouraging them to learn from their mistakes and do better with a second try.

With Ipsative assessments, students can track their individual development, and by prioritizing individual student progress over comparisons with others, the process fosters intrinsic motivation and goal-setting.

Some psychologists consider ipsative assessment as one of the most important types of assessment in education because it focuses on learning rather than meeting standards ― an important factor in helping students measure their own achievements, reflect on their development, and continuously strive for self-improvement.

Here are some ways teachers can incorporate Ipsative assessments into their classrooms:

Project-based learning activities
Comparing pre-test results with final exams
Two-stage testing process

Measuring Assessment Effectiveness in Education

Teacher invigilating students in an exam hall

It’s important to measure the effectiveness of assessments to ensure their validity and reliability. Think of this process as checking whether assessments are doing their job or fulfilling their purpose.

Some methods to measure assessment effectiveness include:

Analyzing item difficulty and discrimination
Conducting item analysis
Comparing assessments to external benchmarks

A good practice is to look at the bigger picture when interpreting assessment results. Teachers should use multiple assessment data sources and consider contextual factors instead of relying on a single assessment or isolated scores to interpret results.

Well-designed assessments should:

Provide feedback on students’ knowledge base
Evaluate student progress
Motivate performance for both students and teachers
Help stakeholders in education set standards

One assessment type isn’t necessarily better than others ― they all have unique characteristics and serve different purposes in education. Formative assessments focus on monitoring and supporting learning in real-time, while summative assessments in education evaluate overall achievement.

Diagnostic assessments provide insights into prior knowledge, and norm-referenced assessments show students’ performance relative to their peers. Ipsative assessments help students identify improvement areas, motivating them to improve in subsequent tests or assignments and to set new goals.

When choosing the appropriate assessment type, a classroom teacher should consider the learning goals, instructional context, and students’ needs. Assessment tools like TestHound can helps those that administer tests be organized and prepared to give them, especially ensuring those with special needs have the resources they require.

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TestHound, our test accommodation software , helps schools coordinate thousands of students across all state and local K-12 school assessments while taking into account dozens of accommodations (reading disabilities, physical disabilities, translations, etc.) for students.
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7 Smart, Fast Ways to Do Formative Assessment

Within these methods you’ll find close to 40 tools and tricks for finding out what your students know while they’re still learning.

Formative assessment—discovering what students know while they’re still in the process of learning it—can be tricky. Designing just the right assessment can feel high stakes—for teachers, not students—because we’re using it to figure out what comes next. Are we ready to move on? Do our students need a different path into the concepts? Or, more likely, which students are ready to move on and which need a different path?

When it comes to figuring out what our students really know, we have to look at more than one kind of information. A single data point—no matter how well designed the quiz, presentation, or problem behind it—isn’t enough information to help us plan the next step in our instruction.

Add to that the fact that different learning tasks are best measured in different ways, and we can see why we need a variety of formative assessment tools we can deploy quickly, seamlessly, and in a low-stakes way—all while not creating an unmanageable workload. That’s why it’s important to keep it simple: Formative assessments generally just need to be checked, not graded, as the point is to get a basic read on the progress of individuals, or the class as a whole.

7 Approaches to Formative Assessment

1. Entry and exit slips: Those marginal minutes at the beginning and end of class can provide some great opportunities to find out what kids remember. Start the class off with a quick question about the previous day’s work while students are getting settled—you can ask differentiated questions written out on chart paper or projected on the board, for example.

Exit slips can take lots of forms beyond the old-school pencil and scrap paper. Whether you’re assessing at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy or the top, you can use tools like Padlet or Poll Everywhere , or measure progress toward attainment or retention of essential content or standards with tools like Google Classroom’s Question tool , Google Forms with Flubaroo , and Edulastic , all of which make seeing what students know a snap.

A quick way to see the big picture if you use paper exit tickets is to sort the papers into three piles : Students got the point; they sort of got it; and they didn’t get it. The size of the stacks is your clue about what to do next.

No matter the tool, the key to keeping students engaged in the process of just-walked-in or almost-out-the-door formative assessment is the questions. Ask students to write for one minute on the most meaningful thing they learned. You can try prompts like:

What are three things you learned, two things you’re still curious about, and one thing you don’t understand?
How would you have done things differently today, if you had the choice?
What I found interesting about this work was...
Right now I’m feeling...
Today was hard because...

Or skip the words completely and have students draw or circle emojis to represent their assessment of their understanding.

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. (Grading quizzes but assigning low point values is a great way to make sure students really try: The quizzes matter, but an individual low score can’t kill a student’s grade.) Kids in many classes are always logged in to these tools, so formative assessments can be done very quickly. Teachers can see each kid’s response, and determine both individually and in aggregate how students are doing.

Because you can design the questions yourself, you determine the level of complexity. Ask questions at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy and you’ll get insight into what facts, vocabulary terms, or processes kids remember. Ask more complicated questions (“What advice do you think Katniss Everdeen would offer Scout Finch if the two of them were talking at the end of chapter 3?”), and you’ll get more sophisticated insights.

3. Dipsticks: So-called alternative formative assessments are meant to be as easy and quick as checking the oil in your car, so they’re sometimes referred to as dipsticks . These can be things like asking students to:

write a letter explaining a key idea to a friend,
draw a sketch to visually represent new knowledge, or
do a think, pair, share exercise with a partner.

Your own observations of students at work in class can provide valuable data as well, but they can be tricky to keep track of. Taking quick notes on a tablet or smartphone, or using a copy of your roster, is one approach. A focused observation form is more formal and can help you narrow your note-taking focus as you watch students work.

4. Interview assessments: If you want to dig a little deeper into students’ understanding of content, try discussion-based assessment methods. Casual chats with students in the classroom can help them feel at ease even as you get a sense of what they know, and you may find that five-minute interview assessments work really well. Five minutes per student would take quite a bit of time, but you don’t have to talk to every student about every project or lesson.

You can also shift some of this work to students using a peer-feedback process called TAG feedback (Tell your peer something they did well, Ask a thoughtful question, Give a positive suggestion). When you have students share the feedback they have for a peer, you gain insight into both students’ learning.

For more introverted students—or for more private assessments—use Flipgrid , Explain Everything , or Seesaw to have students record their answers to prompts and demonstrate what they can do.

5. Methods that incorporate art: Consider using visual art or photography or videography as an assessment tool. Whether students draw, create a collage, or sculpt, you may find that the assessment helps them synthesize their learning . Or think beyond the visual and have kids act out their understanding of the content. They can create a dance to model cell mitosis or act out stories like Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” to explore the subtext.

6. Misconceptions and errors: Sometimes it’s helpful to see if students understand why something is incorrect or why a concept is hard. Ask students to explain the “ muddiest point ” in the lesson—the place where things got confusing or particularly difficult or where they still lack clarity. Or do a misconception check : Present students with a common misunderstanding and ask them to apply previous knowledge to correct the mistake, or ask them to decide if a statement contains any mistakes at all, and then discuss their answers.

7. Self-assessment: Don’t forget to consult the experts—the kids. Often you can give your rubric to your students and have them spot their strengths and weaknesses.

You can use sticky notes to get a quick insight into what areas your kids think they need to work on. Ask them to pick their own trouble spot from three or four areas where you think the class as a whole needs work, and write those areas in separate columns on a whiteboard. Have you students answer on a sticky note and then put the note in the correct column—you can see the results at a glance.

Several self-assessments let the teacher see what every kid thinks very quickly. For example, you can use colored stacking cups that allow kids to flag that they’re all set (green cup), working through some confusion (yellow), or really confused and in need of help (red).

Similar strategies involve using participation cards for discussions (each student has three cards—“I agree,” “I disagree,” and “I don’t know how to respond”) and thumbs-up responses (instead of raising a hand, students hold a fist at their belly and put their thumb up when they’re ready to contribute). Students can instead use six hand gestures to silently signal that they agree, disagree, have something to add, and more. All of these strategies give teachers an unobtrusive way to see what students are thinking.

No matter which tools you select, make time to do your own reflection to ensure that you’re only assessing the content and not getting lost in the assessment fog . If a tool is too complicated, is not reliable or accessible, or takes up a disproportionate amount of time, it’s OK to put it aside and try something different.

A Guide to Types of Assessment: Diagnostic, Formative, Interim, and Summative

Assessments come in many shapes and sizes. For those who are new to assessment or just starting out, the terms can be hard to sort out or simply unfamiliar. Knowing one type of assessment from another can be a helpful way to understand how best to use assessment to your advantage. In this guide to types of assessments, we will cover the different types of assessments you may come across: diagnostic, formative, interim, and summative.

Nature of Assessments

The multi-faceted nature of assessments means that educators can leverage them in a number of ways to provide valuable formal or informal structure to the learning process. The main thing to remember is that the assessment is a learning tool. What all assessments have in common is that they provide a snapshot of student understanding at a particular time in the learning process.

Reasonably so, when you were a K-12 student yourself, you may not have been aware of the variety of assessments that teachers leverage. To the average student, or anyone who has ever been a student, the word ‘test’ has a pretty clear cut definition and it usually includes some level of anxiety and expectation about a final outcome. But, to educators, tests – or assessments – are actually quite multi-faceted and have both formal and informal places throughout the learning process.

Different Types of Assessments

Assessments can run the gamut from start to finish when it comes to instruction. Think of it like a long distance race that has a start and finish line and many stations to refuel in between. The race can be any instructional period of time, such as a unit, a quarter, or even the full year. In this metaphor, the student is the runner and the teacher is the coach who is trying to help the student run the race as well as they possibly can. Different assessments types, when utilized by the coach (teacher) in the right way, can help the runner (student) run the race better and more effectively.

Some assessments are helpful before the race even begins to help determine what the best running strategy is ( diagnostic ). Some assessments are beneficial during the race to track progress and see if adjustments to the strategy should be made during the race ( formative ). Some assessments are given to see if students in entire schools or districts, the entire running team, are moving forward and learning the material ( interim ). And some assessments are best at the very end of the race, to review performance, see how you did, and see how to improve for the next race ( summative ).

How to Use Assessments

Assessments help the teacher determine what to teach, how to teach, and in the end, how effectively they taught it. Assessments can run the gamut from start to finish when it comes to instruction. Think of it like a race that has a start and finish line and many stations to refuel in between.

If you have ever asked the question, “What is a formative assessment?” or have been confused by formative assessment vs. summative assessment or interim vs final, that’s OK! The Pear Assessment team is here to help!

What is a Diagnostic Assessment?

Are students ready for the next unit? What knowledge do they already have about this topic? Teachers who are curious about how much their class knows about a future topic can give diagnostic assessments before diving in.

Diagnostic assessments are pretests. They usually serve as a barometer for how much pre-loaded information a student has about a topic. The word diagnosis is defined as an analysis of the nature or condition of a situation, which is exactly how teachers tend to use them.

Diagnostic tests help to tell the teacher (and the student) how much they know and don’t know about an upcoming topic. This helps to inform the teacher’s lesson planning, learning objectives, and identify areas that may need more or less time spent on.

Components of a Diagnostic Assessment

Happen at the beginning of a unit, lesson, quarter, or period of time.
Goal of understanding student’s current position to inform effective instruction
Identify strengths and areas of improvement for the student
Low-stakes assessments (Usually do not count as a grade)

Difference Between Diagnostic and Formative Assessments

Though both diagnostic assessments and formative assessments aim to inform teachers to instruct more effectively, they emphasize different aspects. Formative assessments are taken during a unit to assess how students are learning the material that the teacher has been teaching. Diagnostic assessments come before this, analyzing what students have learned in the past, many times from different teachers or classes. Both are very helpful for the teacher, and the results are used to identify areas that need more attention in future instruction.

Diagnostic Assessments Examples

At the beginning of a unit on Ancient Greece, a teacher may give a pre-test to determine if the class knows the basic geography, history or culture. The class’ responses will determine where the teacher begins and how much time is dedicated to certain topics. The teacher may learn from this diagnostic assessment that many students already have knowledge on cultural aspects of Greece, but know little about its history. From this, they may adjust the lesson plan to spend a bit more time on the history and origins of Ancient Greece and slightly less on culture.

Keep In Mind

Another valuable use of a diagnostic pre-test is to give the students an idea of what they will have learned by end of the learning period. When combined with a post test, their score on a pre-test will show students just how much knowledge they have gained. This can be a powerful practice for building esteem in students. In fact, some teachers even use the same pre-test and post-test to make this difference more evident. This strategy provides great data on how students have progressed is a sure-tell way to measure and analyze growth over the year.

The grading scale for a diagnostic assessment is usually not based on the number of correct answers and holds little weight for a student’s final grade. You might consider this type of test to be a low-stakes assessment for students.

Diagnostic Assessment Tools

Teachers use Pear Assessment to find or develop diagnostic assessments in a number of creative ways. Some teachers set up diagnostics in the form of introductory activities, classic multiple-choice assessments, or tech-enhanced “quizzes”. The automated grading feature of Pear Assessment makes it easy to instantly know how much information the class as a whole already knows.

Access Free Diagnostic Assessments

Start off the year strong and know where student are at when they begin the school year. Access FREE grade level SmartStart diagnostic assessments for grades 3-12 ELA and Math. Click here to learn more and explore these diagnostic assessments and more in the Pear Assessment Test Library.

Screen shot of Pear Assessment's diagnostic window

What is a Formative Assessment?

How are students doing? Are they picking up the information they should be learning? Teachers who don’t want to wait until the end of a unit or semester use various tactics, like formative assessment, to “check in” with students and see how they are progressing.

What makes formative assessment stand out?

Formative assessment involves the use of immediate insights to guide instruction. If we break down the term, we see that “Formative” comes from Latin formare ‘to form.’ Assessment simply refers to an evaluation. Together the words “formative” and “assessment” refer to a guiding evaluation that helps to shape something. With formative assessment, teachers mold or form instruction to better suit student learning. To glean actionable insights, the best formative assessments are generally easy to implement and offer immediate results that lead to instant intervention or instructional adjustments.

Here’s how education academics Paul Black and Dylan William explain the differences between formative assessment and the general term “assessment”:

We use the general term assessment to refer to all those activities undertaken by teachers — and by their students in assessing themselves — that provide information to be used as feedback to modify teaching and learning activities. Such assessment becomes formative assessment when the evidence is actually used to adapt the teaching to meet student needs.

Another Way to Check-up on Everyone

One common way to think of a formative assessment is to think about “check-ups” with the doctor. During a check-up, the doctor assesses the status of your health to make sure you are on track and to identify any areas where you might need more attention or support. It can be used to promote healthy habits or catch symptoms of illness. If the doctor notices something amiss, they may ask you to exercise more or eat less sugar and more vegetables! The goal is to make strategic changes based on new insights. Similarly, formative assessment provides feedback to teachers, allowing them to “check-in” on how students are doing, or, to match this analogy, the “health” of learning!

Components that Define Formative Assessment

The main intent of formative assessment is to gather insight about student learning during a unit to track student progress and inform instruction.

Formative assessments usually comprise of the following key aspects

Low-stakes assessment
Goal of informing instruction
Gain insight on learning status
Helps identify knowledge retention and understanding
Daily, weekly, or otherwise frequent checks
Generally short and quick checks
Comes in many forms: quiz, exit ticket, artwork, venn diagram, game, presentation, etc.

Examples of Formative Assessment

Formative assessments could include benchmark tests, a class discussion, an “exit ticket” activity or any check-in the teacher conducts to see how much has been learned. By taking a quick formative assessment, the teacher can see how much has been retained and then modify the upcoming lessons or activities to fill in the gaps or pick up the pace. It allows, as the name suggests, a teacher to form or reshape the lessons as they go. Formative assessments can sometimes be called interim assessments.

As you might be able to tell, formative assessments come in many shapes and sizes. They are used by a teacher to assess, or diagnose, how much information has been learned at periodic times in the middle of a unit, subject or year. Formative assessments are the close cousin to diagnostic assessments (add link).

Formative assessments are used in the middle of a learning process to determine if students are maintaining the right pace.

The second trend driving formative assessments is the common-core style of standardized tests. Many schools are using formative tests to help guide the preparation of their students for the formal spring testing season– a time when results have an important impact on the school, district, and even the state. These kind of high-stakes assessments, such as PARCC, SBAC, AIR, ACT Aspire, etc., are driving the need for formative assessments throughout the year.

Like diagnostic assessments, formative assessments are usually given “cold”, without prior access to the information, to get an accurate sample of what has been retained. Similarly, they most often carry little weight towards the student’s final grade.

Online Formative Assessment with Pear Assessment

Many teachers use online digital assessment to gain immediate insights into student progress so they can immediately adjust teaching strategies or intervene where needed. Online assessment autogrades so ultimately teachers are able to save time and spend more time focusing on strong and effective instruction.

Log onto Pear Assessment to access a wide number of online digital assessments in the public assessment library. You may notice that a significant portion of digital assessments in the library are dedicated to helping students prepare for spring testing. Many Pear Assessment Certified assessments are modeled after the tech-enhanced style of questions that are found on the spring assessments. Using these throughout the year helps students build a comfort level with tech-enhanced maneuvers that are key to success on spring tests.

Try out some online formative assessments created by teachers across the country. Assign them to your students or log in to Pear Assessment to create a free account and start making your own!

What is a Benchmark/Interim Assessment?

Are students within a whole school or district understanding the material? Where is there room for growth and how can instruction be improved? These are the types of questions that teachers and school leaders ask and hope to answer when giving benchmark exams.

Defining Benchmark Assessments

A benchmark exam is given across many classes, an entire grade level, a whole school, or across a district. The purpose of a benchmark exam is to understand if students have mastered specific standards and are ready to move on. Typically, benchmark exams are given to help students prepare for end of year state testing, like PARCC, AIR, SBAC, FSA, or PSSA.

It’s important to note that the terms “benchmark exam” and “interim assessment” are used interchangeably. They both are used to measure academic progress of large groups of students. Ideally, the results of a benchmark exam help teachers understand what lessons they need to reteach and which students need extra support. Beyond this, benchmark exams act as a “preview” to how a class, school, or district will perform on state tests or summative exams.

Components of a Benchmark Exam:

Help drive future instruction
Term used interchangeably with “interim assessment”
Given to many classes, a whole school, or across an entire district
Act as a “predictor” to state test scores

Is There a Difference Between Interim Assessment and Benchmark Exam? What About Formative Assessment?

There can be lots of confusion about the different types of assessments. It’s important to recognize these differences and understand how each type of assessment fits into the overall learning process of each student.

There is little to no difference between an interim assessment and a benchmark exam. They are both formal tests often given using technology, like Pear Assessment, to thoroughly and efficiently monitor student progress.

Benchmark exams are also formative in that they help teachers drive their future instruction. While traditional formative assessments are given in one class, benchmark exams are usually given across many different classes or across an entire school. The best benchmark exams give data quickly, so teachers can act on it. This is why digital assessment is great for benchmark exams

Online Benchmark Exams With Pear Assessment

Schools and districts across the country have turned to Pear Assessment Enterprise to administer their common benchmark exams. When benchmark exams are given online, the results are instant and the data can immediately be used to help teachers modify their future lessons. School leaders can set up the test quickly and easily; they even can tie every question to a state standard.

For example, at Burton School District in California, district leaders and teachers are able to push out districtwide benchmark exams without a headache. David Shimer, Director of Education Services at Burton Schools, explains, “I think the ‘aha’ moment was when, within a period of one week, we were able to get every student across the district logged in, have teachers get an assessment from their students, and as a district we were able to get the charts and graphs back in ways that allowed us to adjust instruction and training.”

What is a Summative Assessment?

How well did a student do in this class? Did they learn this unit’s material? When people talk about classic tests or finals, a summative assessment is normally the type of assessment they are referring to.

In this category of assessments, you’ll find the “Big Kahuna” of tests, such as the finals that we pull all-nighters for as well as the tests that get you into college or let you drive on the roads. Summative assessments document how much information was retained at the end of a designated period of learning (e.g. unit, semester, or school year).

Components of Summative Assessments:

Evaluate learning/understanding at the end of a checkpoint
Normally help to determine students’ grade
Used for accountability of schools, students, and teachers
Usually higher stakes than other assessment forms
Preparation and review is helpful for best performance

Summative Assessment Examples

At the end of a semester or a school year, summative tests are used to see how much the student actually learned. It can be the midterm, final grade, or standardized tests. The best summative assessments require a higher level of thinking that synthesizes several important concepts together.

In the traditional sense of the term, summative assessments are what we think of as the big end-of-the-year bubble-sheet or pen-and-paper finals. In the modern-day tech-enhanced classroom summative assessments are increasingly delivered online. Summative assessments can even take the shape of multi-media presentations, group projects, creative writing, plays or other hands-on projects that demonstrate a mastery of the material. In summative assessments, the scores tend to have a significant effect on the student’s final grade or whatever is designated as the measurement of success.

Summative Assessment Tools

Teachers use Pear Assessment’s multimedia function to create summative assessments that use video as a prompt. The multimedia can engage students with audio and visual items and then requires the students to summarize their learning in a classic essay. The result is a traditional, “classic” exam with sophisticated multi-media components.

With Pear Assessment’s standards-tied questions, teachers who give summative assessments can immediately identify if students mastered the concepts they needed to know.

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Five Tips for Quick Formative Assessment

The first two weeks of school are busy. You’re getting into the back-to-school mindset, building classroom community, practicing classroom routines and so much more. You’re also working to understand where students are in their learning and how to facilitate individual growth. Formative assessment is a critical way to monitor student learning – especially at the beginning of the school year – and to provide ongoing feedback throughout the rest of the year.

Are you curious how to use formative assessment to shape the direction and development of learners? Here are our tips for incorporating quick, effective formative strategies in the first two weeks of school and beyond:

1. Use checks for understanding.

Checking for student understanding is essential to formative assessment. There are a variety of ways to check for understanding to gather evidence of student learning, such as:

Summaries and reflections: Students stop and reflect on what they’ve learned. Summaries and reflections can be written or verbal. They require students to use content-specific language.
Lists, charts and graphic organizers: Students can organize information in order to make connections and record relationships among ideas or concepts.
Visual representations: Students explain what they’ve learned with drawings and pictures. Visual representations are helpful for accommodating different learning styles, needs and preferences.
Exit tickets: Students respond to a question, solve a problem or summarize their understanding on an exit ticket after a lesson or activity. You can read these in a few minutes to readily sort students into groups (e.g., skill not mastered, ready to apply or ready to move forward).

2. Facilitate student conversations.

Provide students with opportunities to work together and share what they’ve learned with peers. During a lesson, you can pair students based on level of mastery. As students work together, they can provide feedback and support each other. You can circulate the room to monitor conversations and provide in-the-moment feedback to students while they work.

3. Keep track of data.

When you use formative assessments, keep track of the data you collect. An easy way to observe and assess student growth is by walking around your room with a clipboard and sticky notes/paper. Jot down when you notice that a student acquires a new skill or when another student struggles. Keep track of these notes – maybe in a folder for each child. Then, use this data to inform 1:1, small group or whole class instruction.

4. Provide quick, meaningful feedback.

Using your organized data, give students learning-focused feedback and time to practice using it. Doing so will allow students to move forward in their learning. Note: Feedback can come from various sources. Teachers provide feedback, peers provide feedback and learners are taught to self-assess and generate their own feedback.

5. Empower kids to set and monitor goals.

Formative assessment will be more successful if students are engaged and invested in learning. Allow students the opportunity to create and monitor their own learning goals. Goal-setting helps kids be more open to feedback, and it builds a culture of learning where students support themselves and their peers.

F ormative assessment is the key to academic growth all year long, as it allows students to elicit evidence of learning. Therefore, it’s important to plan effective classroom activities that allow students to demonstrate their understanding. Educators can u se that information to provide feedback that moves students forward in their learning .

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12 essential education types of assessments you must know

Learning and Development

The various education types of assessments provide a means to analyze student performance as well as the appropriateness of the chosen methods.

Typically, to gain a comprehensive view of the teaching process, different types and characteristics of assessments are combined.

This approach helps to check student progress and to contrast the effectiveness of the methodology used.

Additionally, the advent of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the educational environment enhances the objectivity of student supervision.

To assist you in selecting the tools that best match your strategy, this article will list 12 education types of assessments you need to be familiar with.

12 essential education types of assessments you must know

What is an educational assessment?

An educational assessment is a personalized process of monitoring and assessing each student’s progress to ensure they meet the established educational goals and solidify their learning process.

Educational evaluation helps to establish common training levels and ensures that students acquire the knowledge, competencies, and skills necessary for their professional success.

This technique offers benefits to both students and teachers:

Teachers can verify the success or need to readjust their methods.
Students understand what is expected of them , promoting their motivation and involvement.

12 types of assessments and a bonus

Each assessment is selected based on criteria such as the evaluator, the objective, the degree of formality, the timing, the interpretation of the score, or the level of impact sought.

In the following sections, we will discuss 12 types of assessments that can meet some of the criteria we have just listed and many others according to your educational strategy.

We want to point out that in most cases, several are combined to achieve a holistic evaluation that considers the entire universe of the student, their performance, and the pedagogical dynamics employed.

This first type of assessment, sometimes called pre-assessment , focuses on determining the student’s starting point .

In other words, it seeks to identify the presence or absence of prerequisites such as skills, knowledge, competencies, or attitudes.

It can be a prognosis when evaluating a collective or a diagnosis when individually.

Also, it can occur only at the beginning of the educational program or at the start of each topic or subject.

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The formative assessment occurs throughout the entire process in a frequent and interactive manner , aiding in improving pedagogical processes and outcomes.

Its essential characteristic is that it must be ongoing, allowing for evaluating the student’s evolution throughout the program and encouraging them to take an active stance in their performance.

This type of educational assessment can be carried out through periodic tasks, educational journals, or debates and forums .

Summative assessment is based on a set of tests throughout the course and a final one that scores the outcome of learning concerning a student.

It is useful for making decisions regarding students’ achievements at the end of a curricular unit.

These can translate into assignments or exams throughout and at the end of the academic period, allowing for the application of all the knowledge of the training period.

Ipsative assessment compares the student’s results with their previous outcomes .

Here, less rigid than norm-referenced tests, it helps to evaluate strengths and weaknesses individually.

It is often used in forced-choice tests where the student must choose the most truthful option even among proposals that are false, for example.

Confirmative

Confirmative assessment determines if a training process is effective over time , to some extent, it is an extension of summative assessment .

Objective-based

This type of educational assessment examines student performance concerning a specific goal or standardized criteria.

Competency-based

The competencies assessed by this type of test can be of 2 types :

Key. Necessary for the student to advance in the educational path established by an educational system.
Specific . Competencies required to meet the challenges of each area or subject concerning evaluative criteria.

Norm-referenced

Here, these are empirically proven effective and relevant tests that ensure a high degree of objectivity.

Norm-referenced evaluation establishes average grades for an educational center or the educational community of a country for the same subject or curricular content.

Each assessment is selected based on criteria

Criterion-referenced

These tests focus on evaluating a student concerning predetermined criteria or educational standards.

It seeks to verify that the student is acquiring the necessary capabilities at each stage of their education and thus evaluate the body of knowledge transmitted and the skills acquired .

Median-based

In this case, being a group evaluation, precision is not sought but rather to analyze the average performance of a group of students.

This process allows for general conclusions that affect most students, facilitating the refinement of the dynamics used.

Informal evaluation, to some extent, opposes norm-referenced, as it uses more flexible and alternative means .

It can be used to discover the interests and motivations of the students through mere observation but also through individual interviews or dynamics based on gamification in the classroom.

Thanks to the introduction of play, the student adopts an active attitude in their own learning.

Self-assessment

Self-assessment allows the student to become aware of their abilities, capacities, and strengths , as well as i dentify weaknesses that need to be reinforced for successful completion of the educational program.

This awareness reinforces commitment to learning, improving their results.

Bonus: online assessment

More than a type of assessment, it is a means to adapt all those detailed throughout this article and allows deploying all kinds of evaluations easily .

Another great advantage is that using technology to assess students avoids subjectivities , favoring your reputation as an assessment center.

At Smowltech, we are very aware of the possibilities brought about by the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies ( ICT ) in the educational environment, and the challenges it poses.

For this reason, we have become one of the benchmarks in proctoring or remote supervision systems.

Thanks to our proctoring plans , you can build safe environments for your students where their digital privacy is respected.

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> Types of Evaluation in Education

Types of Evaluation in Education

Introduction

Evaluations are used to understand the efficacy of students’ learning processes and strategies used by teachers to teach students. It is a great yardstick to analyze whether students have achieved the learning objectives after the completion of a course or topic. Teachers use different kinds of evaluation methodologies to understand where students stand in terms of their performance in academics. It is considered an effective method to ensure the progress of students. Moreover, with the help of evaluation techniques, students and teachers can understand where the learners fall behind in the learning process. Hence, you must have understood how learning and evaluation go hand in hand. In order to improve the quality of education, the evaluation process should simultaneously happen. Let us look at what evaluation is to understand it in a broader sense. What is Evaluation in education refers to the systematic assessment and analysis of educational programs, processes, and outcomes to determine their effectiveness and make informed decisions for improvement.

What is Evaluation?

Ralph W. Tyler, an American educator has believed to coined the term evaluation in the context of learning and teaching. He has defined evaluation as follows,

Evaluation is "a systematic process of determining the extent to which educational objectives are achieved by pupils"

As mentioned above, evaluation ensures that the students achieve the learning objectives that are set by the educational institution or the relevant authorities. These evaluations are a great way to improve the learning outcomes of the students. When students are evaluated, you as teachers will be able to get an idea about how you can make changes in your teaching methodologies and in their learning styles. These evaluations can help you curate the best learning experiences for your students.

To understand how evaluation can enhance learning and teaching in an educational set-up, let us learn what different levels of evaluation are. The answer to the question of what is evaluation in education is pretty simple, evaluation in education helps in checking or evaluating the knowledge of students. There are several types of evaluation in education. The types of evaluation in education can differ according to the degree or the level of education on which a student is pursuing knowledge.

Evaluation is the art of comparing what should be, and what is, to make a judgment on how to improve performance or decide upon a plan of action. Learning the types of evaluation is an essential tool for individuals still learning, such as students of an educational institution. Without the skill of utilizing types of evaluation in education, it may be hard to see definitive progress in our student lives.

How to understand types of evaluation in education?

Choosing the correct option from a list of types of evaluation can be made easy by breaking the process into several steps. They are discussed as follows:

Set a common objective or general milestone to be achieved by a student of a specific grade/curriculum.
Set a specific change that is required to be monitored in the character/skillset of the student.
Check if the current learning material is sufficient to complete those objectives in a given period. If not, plan learning activities to implement the necessary changes.
Choose from a list of types of evaluation such as monitoring classroom behaviour, quizzes, assessments, oral tests, etc.
Use the results as feedback to plan and implement the next steps of action.

What are the levels of evaluation used in a classroom?

Now that we have familiarized ourselves with what is evaluation in education as well as the basic steps of choosing types of evaluation, the next question that arises is, what exactly are these learning and behavioral objectives that should be monitored? They are based on 3 levels of evaluation:

Norm-referenced:

The teacher compares the characteristics of a specific individual based on the common grades and character traits displayed by their classmates. Attention must be paid to underlying socio-economic or learning disadvantages at play.

Self-referenced:

What is evaluation in education when we consider only one student? The student’s performance in the current period is compared to their performance in an earlier period. For example, the teacher will compare grades received now and in the last semester to check if there is any progress or improvement.

Criterion-referenced:

When the student's performance is interpreted according to the objectives defined by the coursework being undertaken, then it is known as criterion-referencing. There is no mention of other individuals under such types of evaluation in education.

Levels of Evaluation

There are different levels of evaluation to assess the achievement of students. It is not possible to determine the success of a student by solely using a single procedure. These levels use different yardsticks to fathom the achievement of students and assist teachers in evaluating the progress and shortcomings of a student’s performance.

The three levels of evaluation are:

Self-referenced

Criterion-referenced, norm-referenced.

You can refer to the performance of students in the previous tests and how they have improved in the present. In this way, you will be able to assess the progress of the students in their academic endeavors. This is an effective technique to motivate students to perform better.

Any course would have learning objectives and you would expect their students to achieve the objective by the time the course comes to completion. In this type, you will analyze how students are progressing by considering the learning outcomes. You assess whether the students are able to achieve the objectives of the course and if they are progressing in terms of the educational objectives of the course.

Through this type, you will analyze how the students perform in comparison to the other students in the class. You can compare and contrast how students’ performances differ and take necessary steps to bring in changes that can alter the way they learn. This helps them to find out the strategies that work best for them.

Now that you are familiar with the levels of evaluation. Let us learn the different types of evaluation that are generally used to assess students in schools.

Types of Evaluation

There are three types of evaluation that are relevant to students and teachers in an educational institution. The three types of evaluation are:

Formative Evaluation

Summative evaluation, diagnostic evaluation.

Let us discuss each of them in a detailed manner so that you can understand them better.

Formative assessment is a common evaluation method used in schools. Teachers or educators conduct formative assessments multiple times in an academic year to motivate students to learn better. Since the evaluation is conducted many a time, you can use this type to help students understand their weaknesses. You can conduct formative assessment tests to understand how students have grasped a particular portion of the curriculum. This would be a great methodology if you are trying to check for understanding of the students.

It will help you to understand the flaws in your teaching strategies and can make alterations accordingly. Moreover, these tests would help you understand your students in a better way. As in, you will be able to understand their learning styles. In this way, you will be able to tailor your pedagogical approach that best suits your students.

Suggested Read: Formative & Summative Assessment Strategies

Summative evaluation tests occur at the end of an academic year or a course. This evaluation plays a key role in a student’s academic career as it determines the promotion of students into the next stage of their learning journey. Students often receive certificates after the completion of summative exams and it would entail information about their scores in the summative exam.

Students' summative assessments play a vital role in getting into good colleges for higher education as they determine their futures. So, you can help students to get better at their studies with the help of formative assessments and help them to score in summative exams for a better future.

Diagnostic evaluations are very similar to formative assessments. This evaluation is helpful in finding the flaws in the learning process of the students. You can use this methodology to aid students in understanding their weaknesses. Once, they are able to understand the shortcomings in their learning, they will be able to make changes in the learning process and excel in their academic endeavors.

Every educational Institution has one main motive- to promote quality education for each student and provide a nurturing learning environment. For this, they upscale campus and teaching quality, constantly adapt new methodologies, and encourage students for overall participation. However, all this is incomplete without the involvement of evaluation. Teachers evaluate the productive and learning capacity of a child with multiple types and stages of evaluation.

What are the main types of Evaluation?

Diagnostic Evaluation: Often students fail to grasp a concept yet hide it out of being shy, introverted or simply embarrassed. These weaknesses can be formally determined by a teacher with such diagnostic methodologies.
Formative Evaluation: This is the formal widely accepted evaluation method of taking half-yearly and yearly examinations to encourage students to study. Mid-term and monthly theory or practical examinations are also formative methods of testing a child's capabilities, encouraging them to participate and improve.
Summative Evaluation: This is the final report of a child, which includes an average or weighted distribution of marks, ultimately showing the class or grade-wise performance of a student. This is extremely useful in maintaining an overall track record of a child's academic progress mostly.

These types of evaluation in education are often used in combination to provide a comprehensive understanding of the educational process and outcomes. Evaluation in education is crucial for continuous improvement and ensuring that educational goals are met effectively. These are types that define what is evaluation in education.

How many Levels of Evaluation are there?

Norm-referenced: Commonly used to test a child's ability in comparison to other students of similar age or classroom. Teachers can apply unique methods for different types of students in this way, to make them more productive after identifying their shortcomings.
Self-referenced: Yearly reports correspond the most for self-referencing. A child's progress or degradation from past results helps identify methods that worked best for their academic success.
Criterion-referenced: Not every child can achieve class goals and course objectives with the same teaching style or learning material. By using a criterion reference, teachers can identify which methods work and which need to be remodelled for students to achieve their class objectives with greater efficiency and understanding.

Understanding the levels and types of evaluation equips the teacher with the right knowledge to proceed with varied test-taking methods in a classroom. Since each type draws a unique result on the intelligence, consistency, and creative part of a child, carefully evaluating them can help both teachers and parents to positively influence these results.

Types of evaluation B.ed notes is also the same as the above mentioned what is evaluation in education. Types of evaluation B.ed notes are Formative, Summative, and diagnostic. These are some of the primary types of evaluation in education as well as types of evaluation B.ed notes.

Evaluation is an integral part of learning and teaching. It is what makes the learning process more efficient and effective for the students. Moreover, it improves the quality of education for the students. In this way, they will be able to achieve greater things in life with the help of this continuous process.

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What Is Formative Assessment and How Should Teachers Use It?
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14 Examples of Formative Assessment [+FAQs]
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 ...
Formative Assessment Types Explained & Simplified: How to Make Them
There are 3 types of formative assessment (plus an extra 4th one): Screening Assessments. Diagnostic Assessments. Progress Monitoring Assessments. Informal Assessments (which are really a sub-type of progress monitoring) Which formative assessment type you use depends on what your goal is and who you need to assess.
Formative, Summative & More Types of Assessments in Education
St. Paul American School. There are three broad types of assessments: diagnostic, formative, and summative. These take place throughout the learning process, helping students and teachers gauge learning. Within those three broad categories, you'll find other types of assessment, such as ipsative, norm-referenced, and criterion-referenced.
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. Like we consider our formative years when we draw conclusions about ourselves, a ...
Revisiting Dylan Wiliam's Five Brilliant Formative Assessment
The five strategies each get a chapter in his excellent book Embedding Formative Assessment (2011) which builds on the work he developed with other colleagues in the 90s and 00s. The five strategies were expressed as early as 2005: Clarifying, understanding, and sharing learning intentions. Engineering effective classroom discussions, tasks and ...
Formative Assessment of Teaching
Direct evaluation of student work through papers, projects, assignments, exam questions. Student surveys for intended experiences or changes in student beliefs/attitudes. Evaluation of course design components using instructor rubrics. Evaluation of live teaching practice using classroom observation protocols.
PDF 60 Formative Assessment Strategies
Most pre-assessment strategies can be repeated to determine what students have learned and to inform your instruction. 39: Response Cards - There are so many uses for response cards in a classroom. Ask a question and students respond by holding up a card. The most common response cards are yes/no questions.
What Is Formative Assessment: A Practical Guide For Teachers
The goal of formative assessment is to guide the next stage of teaching and learning and inform the teacher and student on their gaps in skills knowledge. In contrast, the goal of summative assessment is a snapshot or record of what a pupil has learnt by a particular point in time, often benchmarked against school, trust or national standards.
What Is Formative Assessment and How Should Teachers Use It?
Formative assessment takes place while learning is still happening. In other words, teachers use formative assessment to gauge student progress throughout a lesson or activity. This can take many forms (see below), depending on the teacher, subject, and learning environment. Here are some key characteristics of this type of assessment:
Formative Assessment
Formative assessment supports personalized learning and is an effective teaching mechanism to inform instruction. A con of formative assessment is time; sometimes formative assessment can impede ...
16 Types of Formative Assessment
16 Types of Formative Assessment. A formative assessment is an evaluation of student comprehension and needs that occurs in the midst of a lesson, unit or course. The purpose of a formative assessment is to help students learn and to improve the learning process itself. The following are common types of formative assessment.
Formative Assessment
Assessment comes in two forms: formative and summative.Formative assessment occurs during the learning process, focuses on improvement (rather than evaluation) and is often informal and low-stakes.. Adjustments in Instruction. Formative assessment allows instructors to gain valuable feedback—what students have learned, how well they can articulate concepts, what problems they can solve.
PDF Formative Assessment
Sadler, D.R. (1989). Formative assessment and the design of instructional systems. Instructional Science, 18 (2): 119-144. Shavelson, R. J. (2006). On the integration of forma-tive assessment in teaching and learning with implica-tions for teacher education. Paper prepared for the Stanford Education Assessment Laboratory and the
6 Types Of Assessments And How To Use Them Effectively
Formative, Summative and Diagnostic assessments are the three most commonly used assessment types. Formative assessments actively monitor student progress. They are low-stakes and lower effort. Summative assessments assess student knowledge at the end of a set learning period (unit, semester, school year, etc.).
PDF formative assessment. 56 different examples of
Ask questions of students to clarify your understanding of student thinking. Record these on an anticipation template, such as the templates in this folder. Anticipate responses. 1. Do the work you are going to give your students first in at least two different ways. 2. Anticipate student responses to the work. 3.
Assessments in Education: 5 Types You Should Know
In addition, several other assessment types serve various specific purposes and can inform instructional decisions. Here are five common assessment types and how they help students learn. 1. Formative Assessment. A formative assessment is an ongoing, interactive evaluation that gauges student learning throughout the instructional process.
7 Smart, Fast Formative Assessment Strategies
3. Dipsticks: So-called alternative formative assessments are meant to be as easy and quick as checking the oil in your car, so they're sometimes referred to as dipsticks. These can be things like asking students to: write a letter explaining a key idea to a friend, draw a sketch to visually represent new knowledge, or.
PDF 4 Formative Assessment Practices that Make a Difference in Classrooms
4 Formative Assessment Practices that Make a Dif erence in Classrooms. Spotlight on: formative assessment strategies and techniques. s do• Specific techniques to try• Implementation tools and tipsTo teachers, it's a familiar challenge: every class period, accomplish a significant amount while facil. tating learning for 25-plus students ...
PDF CHAPTER 1 Formative Assessment and Assessment for Learning
What makes formative assessment formative is that it is immediately used to make adjustments so as to form new learning" (Shepard, 2008, p. 281). The common thread woven throughout formative assessment research, articles, and books bears repeating: it is not the instrument that is formative; it is the chapter1.indd 4 2/6/09 1:32:57 PM
Formative assessment
Formative vs summative assessments. Formative assessment, formative evaluation, formative feedback, or assessment for learning, including diagnostic testing, is a range of formal and informal assessment procedures conducted by teachers during the learning process in order to modify teaching and learning activities to improve student attainment.The goal of a formative assessment is to monitor ...
A Guide to Types of Assessment: Diagnostic, Formative, Interim, and
Formative assessments are the close cousin to diagnostic assessments (add link). Formative assessments are used in the middle of a learning process to determine if students are maintaining the right pace. Keep In Mind The second trend driving formative assessments is the common-core style of standardized tests.
Formative Assessment
Image long description: A diagram showing the Formative assessment process. Five circles are connected by arrows, showing that the process is circular and continuous. The top circle contains the text 'Identifying where the learning is going and what success looks like', with an arrow pointing to the next circle, which contains the text 'Finding evidence of learning in a variety of ways'.
Types of Student Assessment
Here are the main types of student assessments: Formative assessments are designed to monitor student learning and provide ongoing feedback. Examples: Quizzes, classroom discussions, homework assignments, and observational assessments. Summative assessments evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional period.
Five Tips for Quick Formative Assessment
Formative assessment will be more successful if students are engaged and invested in learning. Allow students the opportunity to create and monitor their own learning goals. Goal-setting helps kids be more open to feedback, and it builds a culture of learning where students support themselves and their peers.
Assessment Spotlight, Issue 284
Assessment Spotlight, Issue 283 (added 16-Jul-2024) California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) email update, July 5, 2024. Assessment Spotlight, Issue 278 (added 03-Jun-2024) California Assessment of Student Performance and Progress (CAASPP) email update, May 31, 2024.
12 essential education types of assessments you must know
The various education types of assessments provide a means to analyze student performance as well as the appropriateness of the chosen methods.. Typically, to gain a comprehensive view of the teaching process, different types and characteristics of assessments are combined. This approach helps to check student progress and to contrast the effectiveness of the methodology used.
7 Types of Evaluation in Education
Types of evaluation B.ed notes is also the same as the above mentioned what is evaluation in education. Types of evaluation B.ed notes are Formative, Summative, and diagnostic. These are some of the primary types of evaluation in education as well as types of evaluation B.ed notes. Conclusion. Evaluation is an integral part of learning and ...
Personal Development, Health and Physical Education 7-10
The new Personal Development, Health and Physical Education 7−10 Syllabus (2024) is to be implemented from 2027.. 2025 and 2026 - Plan and prepare to teach the new syllabus 2027 - Start teaching the new syllabus School sectors are responsible for implementing syllabuses and are best placed to provide schools with specific guidance and information on implementation given their ...
Standardized Testing Pros And Cons
These formative classroom assessments "have had the most significant impact on student learning and achievement" (Volante & Sonia, 2010). Formative assessments can be used on a daily basis, in the classroom, to evaluate the progress that each student is making. These types of assessments do not merely measure whether or not a stduents has ...

14 Examples of Formative Assessment [+FAQs]

What is Formative Assessment?

14 Examples of Formative Assessment Tools & Strategies

5 REASONS WHY CONTINUING EDUCATION MATTERS FOR EDUCATORS

List of Formative Assessment Resources

FAQs About Formative Assessment

Is formative assessment something new?

What makes something a formative assessment?

Does formative assessment work in all content areas?

How can formative assessment support the curriculum?

How can formative assessment be used to establish instructional priorities?

Can formative assessment close achievement gaps?

How can I help my students understand formative assessment?

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Summative Assessment

Formative Assessment

Formative Assessment Types

1. Screening Assessments:

2. Diagnostic Assessments:

3. Progress Monitoring:

4. Informal Assessments: (a sub-type of progress monitoring)

When do I collect data from formative assessments?

EASY Formative Note-Taking Strategies:

Taking notes while walking around the classroom:

Taking Notes during the middle of a lesson:

What do you take notes on?

Progress Monitoring for Intervention

How do you Progress Monitor?

FREE Tools for Progress Monitoring:

Formal Progress Monitoring Tips

1. Make it quick!

2. Make it simple.

3. Make it targeted.

4. Make it aligned.

5. Make it consistent.

6. Make it recorded.

7. Make it easy.

Informal Assessments (it doesn’t have to be complicated)

Informal Formative Assessment Strategies

WHEN to Give Formative Assessments

DURING a lesson:

AFTER a lesson:

Formal Progress Monitoring:

Formative Assessment Examples: EASY Assessments

Formative Assessment Examples:

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Teachers' Essential Guide to Formative Assessment

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Revisiting Dylan Wiliam’s Five Brilliant Formative Assessment Strategies.

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Formative Assessment of Teaching

Formative Assessment

Effectiveness in Teaching

What are some strategies that I might try?

Teaching Portfolios

Teaching Demos or Peer Observation

Student Learning Assessments

Student Surveys or Focus Groups

How might I get started?

References:

What Is Formative Assessment and How Should Teachers Use It?

What is formative assessment?

Low-Stakes (or No-Stakes)