14 Examples of Formative Assessment [+FAQs]

what does it mean when an assignment is formative

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.”

what does it mean when an assignment is formative

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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what does it mean when an assignment is formative

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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What Is Formative Assessment? Everything You Need To Know

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To make teaching and learning as effective as possible, you need easy access to real-time, in-the-moment student data. Without it, you risk missing gaps in student understanding. But where and how can you collect this data, analyze it, and apply it to your instructional practices? Formative assessments are the answer.

Today, we’re answering the question, “What is formative assessment?” and exploring ways you can incorporate formative assessments into your daily instruction to collect the data you need.

What is formative assessment?

Why is formative assessment important in the classroom, types of formative assessments to add to your lessons, 5 hallmarks of a formative assessment cycle.

Formative assessments are a lower-stakes method for tracking students' understanding and monitoring their learning. By lower stakes, we mean these assessments don’t significantly affect a student’s final unit, quarter, or yearly grade. Instead, they’re meant to record students’ progress as they learn to give insights about performance building to that final grade. 

Formative assessments can happen at any time during a lesson or unit and are integral to the learning process. They provide regular, frequent feedback about how students are learning, helping you improve your teaching methods and lessons. They also encourage student self-evaluation to identify their strengths and weaknesses and discover where they need more practice or support. Examples of formative assessments include:

Weekly quizzes

Self-reflections

Homework assignments

Exit tickets

Read more: 15 Formative Assessment Examples To Add to Daily Lessons

According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, formative assessments are a cost-effective, low-prep way to increase student engagement . You can use them to monitor your students’ academic journeys in the moment. Formative assessments are an excellent way to get real-time insights into what your students understand and adjust your teaching strategies accordingly.

These assessments also let students practice showing what they know, preparing them for higher-stakes assessments that happen throughout the year. Ideally, formative assessments also give you a sneak peek at how students are progressing toward grade-level standards. 

This provides more visibility into how students might perform on interim and end-of-year assessments. That way, you can understand if students “get” what you’re teaching—and make adjustments if they don’t—to better prepare them for higher-stakes tests.

Formative assessments are diverse and allow students to show their learning through multiple modalities. The flexibility and variety help you pulse-check student knowledge and understanding at any time during instruction. Here are some categories of formative assessments that you can incorporate into your lessons to understand what your students are learning and identify areas for extra support:

Pretests or pre-assessments happen before you teach a new lesson. Their purpose is to help you find out what students already know about a lesson theme or topic. They also point out potential misconceptions or knowledge gaps. Pretest results can—and should—guide your lesson instruction based on your students’ needs.

The data you get from a pretest can show you areas where you can help students build background knowledge so they can better understand the upcoming lesson. Pretest data also highlights review or reteach opportunities from previous lessons and insights into areas where you can extend and accelerate learning.

Checks for understanding

Checks for understanding are formative assessments you can use throughout a lesson to determine what students are learning and retraining as you teach. You can include them at natural pauses in instruction, such as when finishing a page in a textbook, a chapter in a novel, or a group of slides in a presentation.

These formative assessments give you the chance to ask students basic review questions about the material you just taught. They’ll help you see if students understood a particular part of the lesson before you move on. If they still have knowledge gaps, you can go back and review or adjust instruction to spend more time on unclear topics. 

Performance tasks

Performance tasks are activities where students show what they know by producing a tangible product or performance. The tasks can be as simple as completing a worksheet of math problems for homework, writing a book report, or giving an oral presentation in class. They can also include more involved individual and group projects, like creative writing assignments, science experiments, or real-world applications aligned with students’ interests to enhance engagement and motivation.

Performance tasks help you understand if students can apply what they learned in class in other formats or settings. With this type of formative assessment, you can see if students can take the knowledge they learned and use it to do a task independently or if they can use it to analyze and synthesize something new.

If students can’t complete a performance task, it doesn’t mean they don’t understand the material. Instead, they may be unsure of how to synthesize what they learned to a new format or situation. In this case, you may reteach some of the material and provide more strategies and tips on how they can use what they learned in other situations.

Peer feedback

Peer feedback formative assessments allow students to give each other constructive advice about their work. This type of assessment is particularly useful in ELA classrooms, especially for writing assignments, and to help support language, speaking, and listening skills. During these exercises, students may suggest revisions, next steps, or alternative ideas one-on-one or in small groups. Peers don’t give each other grades or scores. They only provide constructive suggestions.

This collaborative exercise lets students practice their skills and test their knowledge through evaluation rather than construction. Essentially, students assume the role of a tutor or teacher and look at a classmate’s work from that lens. 

Make sure students have a primer on how to give and receive feedback before they try this type of formative assessment. Teach them the difference between constructive feedback and unnecessary feedback when reviewing someone else’s work. It’s also crucial that they know receiving feedback can be hard or uncomfortable, so it’s important to do the assessment correctly but compassionately by promoting a positive and respectful environment.

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Self-assessments

Self-assessments help students independently reflect on their knowledge and skill growth. Similar to peer reviews, self-assessments let students look critically at their own work and progress. The goal is to find strengths and areas for improvement. Students don’t give themselves grades or scores but simply evaluate their performance or output.

Self-assessments can be simple, like emoji reactions to how they feel after learning a new topic. These assessments can also be more in-depth, such as with self-edits or reviews of a writing rough draft. In either case, self-assessments help students track their own progress toward goals, make adjustments, and add more practice or studying as needed.

After doing a self-assessment, students should have the opportunity to review important concepts and revise their work if necessary. This promotes a culture of improvement rather than always trying to be right the first time.

Like any method of testing, formative assessments follow a cycle. The difference in cadence among formative, interim/benchmark, and summative assessments is that formative ones occur more frequently. Below are five steps typically included in a formative assessment cycle to inform lesson planning, data collection, and student learning:

1. Set learning goals

Each lesson should have an objective that states what students need to learn and understand by the end of it. That goal or objective should influence how you teach the lesson, what materials you use, and what type of formative assessment you assign.

It’s also important to convey these learning goals to students. This information will help them understand what they’re supposed to get out of a lesson and what they’ll be assessed on at the end of it.

2. Gather evidence of student thinking and understanding

Formative assessments help you and your students better understand their learning and thinking. These assessments are also a good way to measure students’ progress toward a learning goal or objective. They can influence what types of formative assessments to use and what questions or activities to include.

For some objectives, it might be something as simple as an emoji reaction to gauge how they feel about a topic. For others, the formative assessment might need to check their understanding of knowledge or their ability to output a tangible product, like a written paragraph.

3. Make time for self-assessment and peer feedback

Unlike interim/benchmark and summative assessments, formative assessments are lower stakes and can be more informal. It’s not always the teacher telling students that they’re right or wrong. Make time for self-assessment and peer feedback throughout the formative assessment cycle.

Self-assessments help students monitor their own progress. They can determine areas where they’re achieving and areas where they need more practice or support. With practice, they’ll be able to recognize these areas themselves without waiting for a teacher to point them out.

Peer feedback gives students the chance to work with and learn from each other. Working with classmates to achieve a common goal can increase motivation and help students become more engaged and active participants in their learning.

4. Provide actionable teacher feedback

Formative assessments are the perfect time to provide actionable feedback for students. The best formative assessment feedback is actionable, meaning it gives students tangible advice about where they went wrong and how to improve. Good feedback is also timely and comes as close to in-the-moment as possible when students are actively learning and engaged in a topic. 

A 2009 study by Yigal Attali and Don Powers found that receiving immediate feedback makes it easier for students to correct initial mistakes and avoid repeating them as they continue to learn. This feedback students get during formative assessments can help them when they have to take higher-stakes assessments.

Students can’t—and won’t—get immediate feedback after they’re done with an interim/benchmark or summative assessment. You won’t be able to go over the most missed questions or correct misconceptions in a timely manner. But the more feedback you can give during a formative assessment cycle, the more guiding information students can use and take with them to apply when they’re taking higher-stakes tests.

5. Adjust instruction accordingly

Finally, when you learn from gathering student data and engaging in a feedback loop with your students, all the information you collect can inform instruction. For example, a check for understanding in the middle of the lesson may show students aren’t grasping a concept. You can pivot and spend more time discussing the confusing topic to improve students’ clarity rather than plowing ahead with the pre-planned lesson.

The data you receive also helps affect future instruction. For example, you may identify common misconceptions on a topic from this year’s students, and next year you can spend more time building background knowledge or identifying other ways to address larger knowledge gaps in those areas to increase clarity.

Formative assessment made easy

Formative can help you create, share, and use any type of formative assessment. It’s right in the name! Features of formative that help you pulse-check your students’ progress regularly include:

20+ question and content types to keep students engaged and offer them a variety of ways to show their knowledge.

Tools for creating lesson-ready presentations and presenting formative assessments in teacher-paced mode alongside slides, videos, passages, and more.

Real-time student insights from daily activities like bell ringers and exit tickets to power informed instruction.

Standards tagging and overview reports to help identify opportunities for improvement or reteaching.

Video enhancement features that allow you to embed formative assessments at timestamped moments .

Student practice sets that allow students to practice and learn independently, with teacher visibility into their progress.

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