what does it mean when an assignment is formative

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Formative Assessment

Formative assessment refers to 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. 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 general goal of formative assessment is to collect detailed information that can be used to improve instruction and student learning while it’s happening . What makes an assessment “formative” is not the design of a test, technique, or self-evaluation, per se, but the way it is used—i.e., to inform in-process teaching and learning modifications.

Formative assessments are commonly contrasted with summative assessments , which are used to evaluate student learning progress and achievement at the conclusion of a specific instructional period—usually at the end of a project, unit, course, semester, program, or school year. In other words, formative assessments are for learning, while summative assessments are of learning. Or as assessment expert Paul Black put it, “When the cook tastes the soup, that’s formative assessment. When the customer tastes the soup, that’s summative assessment.” It should be noted, however, that the distinction between formative and summative is often fuzzy in practice, and educators may hold divergent interpretations of and opinions on the subject.

Many educators and experts believe that formative assessment is an integral part of effective teaching. In contrast with most summative assessments, which are deliberately set apart from instruction, formative assessments are integrated into the teaching and learning process. For example, a formative-assessment technique could be as simple as a teacher asking students to raise their hands if they feel they have understood a newly introduced concept, or it could be as sophisticated as having students complete a self-assessment of their own writing (typically using a rubric outlining the criteria) that the teacher then reviews and comments on. While formative assessments help teachers identify learning needs and problems, in many cases the assessments also help students develop a stronger understanding of their own academic strengths and weaknesses. When students know what they do well and what they need to work harder on, it can help them take greater responsibility over their own learning and academic progress.

While the same assessment technique or process could, in theory, be used for either formative or summative purposes, many summative assessments are unsuitable for formative purposes because they do not provide useful feedback. For example, standardized-test scores may not be available to teachers for months after their students take the test (so the results cannot be used to modify lessons or teaching and better prepare students), or the assessments may not be specific or fine-grained enough to give teachers and students the detailed information they need to improve.

The following are a few representative examples of formative assessments:

• Questions that teachers pose to individual students and groups of students during the learning process to determine what specific concepts or skills they may be having trouble with. A wide variety of intentional questioning strategies may be employed, such as phrasing questions in specific ways to elicit more useful responses.
• Specific, detailed, and constructive feedback that teachers provide on student work , such as journal entries, essays, worksheets, research papers, projects, ungraded quizzes, lab results, or works of art, design, and performance. The feedback may be used to revise or improve a work product, for example.
• “Exit slips” or “exit tickets” that quickly collect student responses to a teacher’s questions at the end of a lesson or class period. Based on what the responses indicate, the teacher can then modify the next lesson to address concepts that students have failed to comprehend or skills they may be struggling with. “Admit slips” are a similar strategy used at the beginning of a class or lesson to determine what students have retained from previous learning experiences .
• Self-assessments that ask students to think about their own learning process, to reflect on what they do well or struggle with, and to articulate what they have learned or still need to learn to meet course expectations or learning standards.
• Peer assessments that allow students to use one another as learning resources. For example, “workshopping” a piece of writing with classmates is one common form of peer assessment, particularly if students follow a rubric or guidelines provided by a teacher.

In addition to the reasons addressed above, educators may also use formative assessment to:

• Refocus students on the learning process and its intrinsic value, rather than on grades or extrinsic rewards.
• Encourage students to build on their strengths rather than fixate or dwell on their deficits. (For a related discussion, see growth mindset .)
• Help students become more aware of their learning needs, strengths, and interests so they can take greater responsibility over their own educational growth. For example, students may learn how to self-assess their own progress and self-regulate their behaviors.
• Give students more detailed, precise, and useful information. Because grades and test scores only provide a general impression of academic achievement, usually at the completion of an instructional period, formative feedback can help to clarify and calibrate learning expectations for both students and parents. Students gain a clearer understanding of what is expected of them, and parents have more detailed information they can use to more effectively support their child’s education.
• Raise or accelerate the educational achievement of all students, while also reducing learning gaps and achievement gaps .

While the formative-assessment concept has only existed since the 1960s, educators have arguably been using “formative assessments” in various forms since the invention of teaching. As an intentional school-improvement strategy, however, formative assessment has received growing attention from educators and researchers in recent decades. In fact, it is now widely considered to be one of the more effective instructional strategies used by teachers, and there is a growing body of literature and academic research on the topic.

Schools are now more likely to encourage or require teachers to use formative-assessment strategies in the classroom, and there are a growing number of professional-development opportunities available to educators on the subject. Formative assessments are also integral components of personalized learning and other educational strategies designed to tailor lessons and instruction to the distinct learning needs and interests of individual students.

While there is relatively little disagreement in the education community about the utility of formative assessment, debates or disagreements may stem from differing interpretations of the term. For example, some educators believe the term is loosely applied to forms of assessment that are not “truly” formative, while others believe that formative assessment is rarely used appropriately or effectively in the classroom.

Another common debate is whether formative assessments can or should be graded. Many educators contend that formative assessments can only be considered truly formative when they are ungraded and used exclusively to improve student learning. If grades are assigned to a quiz, test, project, or other work product, the reasoning goes, they become de facto summative assessments—i.e., the act of assigning a grade turns the assessment into a performance evaluation that is documented in a student’s academic record, as opposed to a diagnostic strategy used to improve student understanding and preparation before they are given a graded test or assignment.

Some educators also make a distinction between “pure” formative assessments—those that are used on a daily basis by teachers while they are instructing students—and “interim” or “benchmark” assessments, which are typically periodic or quarterly assessments used to determine where students are in their learning progress or whether they are on track to meeting expected learning standards. While some educators may argue that any assessment method that is used diagnostically could be considered formative, including interim assessments, others contend that these two forms of assessment should remain distinct, given that different strategies, techniques, and professional development may be required.

Some proponents of formative assessment also suspect that testing companies mislabel and market some interim standardized tests as “formative” to capitalize on and profit from the popularity of the idea. Some observers express skepticism that commercial or prepackaged products can be authentically formative, arguing that formative assessment is a sophisticated instructional technique, and to do it well requires both a first-hand understanding of the students being assessed and sufficient training and professional development.

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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?

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?

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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?

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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 ..

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25 Formative Assessment Options Your Students Will Actually Enjoy

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

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

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

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

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

Summative assessment

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

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

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

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

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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: 

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:

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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Formative vs. Summative Assessments: What's the Difference?

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March 19th, 2024 | 8 min. read

Brad Hummel

Coming from a family of educators, Brad knows both the joys and challenges of teaching well. Through his own teaching background, he’s experienced both firsthand. As a writer for iCEV, Brad’s goal is to help teachers empower their students by listening to educators’ concerns and creating content that answers their most pressing questions about career and technical education.

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Whether you’re an administrator, supervisor, or teacher, you’ve heard of formative assessments and summative assessments . They're both essential parts of any curriculum map . But what do these terms actually mean?

In a nutshell, formative assessments are quizzes and tests that evaluate how someone is learning material throughout a course .

Summative assessments are quizzes and tests that evaluate how much someone has learned throughout a course .

In the classroom, that means formative assessments take place during a course, while summative assessments are the final evaluations at the course’s end. 

That's the simple answer, but there's actually a lot more that makes formative and summative assessments different. To fully understand formative vs. summative assessments, you'll need to understand the details of these two important forms of assessment.

In this article, we'll take a closer look at formative and summative quizzing and assessing. When you've finished reading, you'll understand how to better test student knowledge in your classroom.

What Are Formative Assessments?

Formative assessments are evaluations of someone’s learning progress in a classroom.

Common formative assessments include:

• Presentations
• Group activities

Formative assessments work great when they’re used on a regular basis. That regularity could be based on a calendar (every Monday, every Thursday, etc.) or your lesson plans (every unit).

They’re also more flexible than summative assessments. You don’t always have to use pencil and paper to get a feel for your students’ progress. Instead, you can use in-class games, group presentations, and hands-on activities to evaluate student progress.

Ultimately, the formative assessments you use are up to you. After all, no one knows your classes better than you. So if you’d prefer to get an overview of how well your students are learning, you can use a group-style assessment like a game. If you want to know where each student struggles, you can use an individual assessment like a quiz.

This flexibility is perfect for keeping students engaged in your class. It lets you stick to a syllabus while mixing up the exact task each student has to perform. That way, you don’t fall into a predictable routine of teach-test-teach-test. Instead, you have a varied routine of teach-game-quiz-teach-presentation-project or another interesting format.

By the time your course ends, you’ll have a full understanding of how students are learning as you teach a subject. Then, you can keep all of your grades to look for patterns among different class sections.

Is there an area where students seem to do worse than others? Could you adjust a lesson and shoot for better results?

Naturally, you’ll never get a class that’s straight A’s from top to bottom. But you can still design your classroom assessments to work for as many students as possible!

Top 3 Formative Assessment Examples

Formative assessments are excellent opportunities to let your students flex their creative muscles.

Even if a student isn’t much of a writer or artist, they can still have a little fun with these assessments.

1. Make an Advertisement

Have your students create an advertisement for a concept they just learned. Use visuals and text to really sell an idea.

This makes students apply what they’ve learned into a creative exercise, which helps with long-term retention.

2. Idea Comparisons

Instruct students to lay out the main ideas of a new concept they learned. Then, have them compare that concept to another to see where they agree and disagree.

In addition to helping students remember these concepts, this exercise makes them apply previous knowledge to a new format so they can remember it better in the future.

3. Misconceptions

After you introduce a concept to students, introduce a popular misconception about it. Have students discuss why the misconception is false and where it may have started.

This exercise makes students think critically about what they’ve just learned while showing them how to debunk misinformation.  

How Do You Track Formative Assessments?

You can track formative assessments in one of three ways: by grade, by feel, and with student data .

Let's take a closer look at using each of these methods to monitor student progress.

Track by Grade

First, you can track them by grade . This gives you a specific, concentrated view of how a student (or group of students) learns. However, graded assessments are sources of stress for many students. So if you want to make a unit fun or loose, graded assessments may not work well for you. 

Track by Feel

Second, you can track them by feel . This is more based on your teacher instinct, allowing you to pick which students need additional support based on your observation. On the downside, you can’t “show” this information to your administrators. If you have certain standards to meet throughout a marking period, you won’t be able to prove you’ve fulfilled those standards without grades.

Track with Student Data

Finally, you can track formative assessments with  student data . This is non-graded information that may reflect how your students are learning, such as questions they've frequently answered incorrectly or subject areas where they've had trouble. After all, not everything has to be a grade!

When you have a comprehensive data management system in place, tracking with student data can be the most effective way to measure student progress.

With all of that said and done, let’s next consider summative assessments.

What Are Summative Assessments?

Summative assessments are evaluations of what someone has learned throughout a course. 

Common summative assessments include:

• Final exams
• End-of-class projects

Summative assessments almost always take place at the end of a course unless a teacher decides to break a course into more manageable chunks. They’re often cumulative, and they’re used to evaluate a student’s long-term information retention.

In summative assessments like final exams , you can include questions from the first week or two of a course to ensure students retained introductory information. In other assessments like papers, your students can pull from a full marking period of learning to apply to a topic.

Either way, your students have to do some serious reflecting and critical thinking to bring together the information from an entire course.

This is a great way to ensure students retain essential information from one course to another. So if you teach introductory courses, summative assessments are perfect to set students up for success in their next classes.

That’s important because a student’s success in your classroom is just one step for them. When you prepare them for the next step, you make it easier for them to succeed in the future as well.

In that way, summative assessments serve two purposes:

First , they evaluate what someone learned while they’ve been in your class.

Second , they evaluate how prepared someone is to go to the next academic level.

Combined with the rest of a student’s performance in class, summative quizzing and assessments are excellent ways to gauge progress while ensuring long-term information retention.

Top 3 Summative Assessment Examples

Summative assessments are traditionally more structured and standardized than formative assessments.

Still, you have a few options to shake things up that go beyond a pen-and-paper test.

1. In-depth reports

Instruct students to choose a topic that resonated with them in class and report in-depth on it. This is a great opportunity for students to take an idea and run with it under your supervision.

These reports often showcase a student’s interest, and you’ll be able to evaluate a student’s engagement level in the class by how they approach the report.

The goal is a passionate, intelligent, and comprehensive examination of a concept that matters to a student. 

2. Cumulative, individual projects

Have your students pick a project to complete. This project should somehow reflect what they’ve learned throughout the course.

Projects are great for any practical application class from health science to physics. Creating a cross-section of the human heart, designing a diet, or creating a protective egg-drop vessel are all fun ways students can show off their knowledge of a topic.

3. Personal evaluation papers

Require students to apply principles from your class to their personal lives. These papers are excellent fits for psychology, nutrition, finance, business, and other theory-based classes.

In a nutshell, personal evaluations let students look at themselves through a different lens while exploring the nuances of the principles they learned in class.  Plus, it lets students do something everyone loves — talk about themselves!

Now that you have a few ideas on summative assessments, how can you track their success?

How Do You Track Summative Assessments?

While everyone has their own ideas on this topic, grades are the best way to evaluate someone’s success with a summative assessment.

How you grade is ultimately up to you. Presentations are great ways to grade someone based on a number of factors, including soft skills like public speaking. Written exams or project-based assessments are ideal to see a student’s full-scope understand of your class after a marking period.

Whatever you choose, stick to a consistent grading scale so you can identify your own strengths and weaknesses in the classroom as students complete your course. 

What’s More Important: Formative or Summative Assessments?

Many new teachers have this question — are formative or summative assessments more important?

In a perfect world, they’re equally important. Formative assessments let students show that they’re learning, and summative assessments let them show what they’ve learned.

But American public education values summative assessments over formative assessments. Standardized tests — like the SATs — are great examples of high-value summative assessments.

It’s rare to find the same emphasis on formative quizzing and assessments. That’s because formative assessments act like milestones while summative assessments show the bottom line.

We encourage teachers to look at these assessments as two sides of the same coin. Formative and summative assessments work together flawlessly when implemented properly.

With all of that in mind, you only have one question left to answer. How are you going to add these assessments to your curriculum ?

Use Formative and Summative Assessments and Meet Your Challenges

As a teacher, you’ll likely need to employ both summative and formative assessments in your curriculum. An effective balance of these assessments will help you understand your students’ needs while meeting your standards.

However, CTE teachers face challenges in the classroom each day that sometimes get in the way of connecting with students and preparing them for these assessments.

If you want to feel less overwhelmed and spend more time helping your students succeed, download your free guide . You’ll learn about five of the most significant challenges teachers face and how you can overcome them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right before a lesson

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

During a lesson

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

Immediately after a lesson

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

Never stop learning

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

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The Power of Formative Assessment: 7 Ways It Can Benefit Learners

As schools increasingly look to personalized learning paths to drive student outcomes, teachers must first understand what their students do and do not know to create those paths. Formative assessment gives teachers the data they need to make informed classroom decisions. 

Formative assessment is an incremental practice to evaluate student learning and provide feedback to improve understanding. It helps teachers assess what students have learned, what they need to learn next, and how to adjust teaching strategies. Implementing formative assessment strategies requires a mindset of continuous improvement and commitment to student-centered learning.

Here are some basic principles of formative assessment:

• Help teachers identify learning objectives and assess student progress.
• Provides ongoing feedback that is timely, relevant, and specific to help identify the strengths and weaknesses of individual students.
• Formative assessment informs instruction, and teachers can use the data to personalize learning and change their lesson plans, teaching strategies, and instructional materials.
• Involves active student participation in learning, allowing students to be responsible for their education.
• Formative assessment is essential for teachers to help students achieve their learning goals and mastery. Explore the impact formative assessment has on learners.

7 Ways Formative Assessment Benefits Learners

• Increases Confidence & Mastery

Formative assessment creates an environment that celebrates achievements throughout instruction. Students gain valuable practice as they overcome minor challenges. By setting achievable goals and receiving regular feedback, students can see their progress over time, boosting their confidence and motivation and forging their path to mastery.

• Supports Student Engagement

Empowering learners to take an active role in their education fosters an understanding of the value of effort. Instead of passively retaining information, the formative assessment allows students to participate actively in learning. Students reflect on their learning and receive feedback on their progress, which can help them feel more involved and invested in their education . An interactive class environment encourages knowledge-sharing and participation, increasing student engagement .

• Fosters a Growth Mindset

Students receive feedback on their progress rather than their performance, fostering a growth mindset. In addition, students begin to see challenges as opportunities for growth and learning, which boosts their class involvement and commitment to the learning process.

• Strengthens Analytical Skills

Formative assessment prompts students to apply their acquired knowledge and draw conclusions based on their evaluation of the information. These activities help students build their analytical skills by requiring them to think critically and systematically about the information presented. Formative feedback enables learners to recognize task-related strengths and weaknesses, further fostering problem-solving ability.

•  Encourages Students to Develop Responsibility

Students receive timely and personalized feedback from teachers, encouraging self-reflection and action. Practical assessment techniques help students take ownership of their learning and set personal goals. Students develop an intrinsic need to reach their unique milestones as they strive for personal success.

• Builds Communication Skills

As students engage in learning, they discover how to express their ideas effectively. Clear articulation and demonstration of material support content mastery. Therefore assessments that drive communication are valuable. For instance, teachers apply simple class conversations as a quick and informal way to gauge student understanding. 

• Helps Students Develop a Positive View of Assessment

Result-focused assessments can cause student stress, creating an apprehensive learning experience. Educators can transform how students view assessments. By focusing on the student and their opportunity to learn, teachers can improve learning outcomes. Shifting to a learning-based approach helps the students focus on the content, decreasing anxiety and result-based concerns.  

Utilize Multiple Assessment Methods

Various formative assessment methods will help you get a comprehensive picture of student learning. You can also provide learners with voice and choice when demonstrating mastery, which promotes ownership of learning. 

Presentations: Provide opportunities for students to demonstrate their understanding of the learning material and engage with the class. Presentations can take various forms, such as a slideshow, a video, a poster, or a speech.

Projects: Students use their knowledge of the material and skills to create something new or solve a problem

Collaborative work: Use peer assessment and feedback or group projects to help students learn from each other and develop their teamwork skills.

Observations: We all want to be data-driven, but gathering evidence through open-ended observations is also critical in providing feedback and informing instruction.

Here are a few examples:

• Traditional Poster Board
• Slide Presentation
• Video Presentation
• Peer Feedback
• Group Skits
• Box Diorama
• Clay Models
• Virtual Models

Strategies to Implement Formative Assessment

Formative assessment is an effective tool that prioritizes the learner. Students benefit from skill-building, ongoing feedback, and adjustments to instruction throughout the learning process. Learn how to implement formative assessment in the classroom effectively. 

• Call and respond: Educators can juggle open, closed, and high-order questions while using engagement techniques to boost their Q&A sessions. Closed questions help measure material recall and retention. Open and high-ordered questions require further elaboration, allowing students to express their comprehension of the material. 
• Exit tickets: At the end of a lesson, teachers can provide a short activity or prompt for students to complete to check for understanding. Exit tickets help identify areas where students may need additional support or clarification for the next lesson.
• Conversations: Conversations can be a valuable formative assessment tool in 1:1 or small group discussions. Teachers can gain insight into their thought processes and understanding of the material by engaging in dialogue with students.
• Think-pair-share: Teachers can provide a prompt or question for students to reflect on briefly before discussing with a partner.
• Popsicle Questions
• Class Jeopardy
• Virtual Quiz
• Four Corners
• Venn Diagram
• Quick Share

Formative Assessment Tools for Teachers

Continue to explore effective formative assessment methods and techniques to add impact in the classroom, improve student outcomes, and drive learner success. Learn more about key strategies for impactful formative assessment .

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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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What Is a Formative Assessment and Why Should I Use One to Study?

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We all know the formula from beginning to end. You enroll in a course. You listen attentively in class, you take notes, and you study the materials your teacher gives you. At the end of the unit, you take an exam that measures your knowledge and voila – you get a grade reflecting your performance in the course. This is no doubt a familiar pattern to any student.

But what happens when this formula gets turned upside down? Have you ever walked into a class at the beginning of a new unit only to be greeted by a surprise quiz? Odds are it’s happened once or twice, and it can be a bit of an unnerving experience. After all, no one wants to be tested on material you haven’t learned yet! But there’s good news. These types of tests or quizzes aren’t meant to shape your grade in the class. In fact, they’re probably not even graded at all.

Tests, quizzes, surveys, and learning journals completed at the beginning of a new unit or at the start of any studying endeavor are called formative assessments, and they are actually the cornerstone of common teaching practice. Formative assessments are rooted in the idea that you cannot learn something in a focused, concentrated way without having a realistic idea of where you’re starting from. Teachers will use these types of assessments at the beginning of a class or of a new unit to help guide their instruction. To learn more about what a formative assessment is, and how you could be using one to guide your own studying, read on.

What is a formative assessment?

It’s likely that you’re more familiar with the summative assessment, a close cousin of the formative assessment. Summative assessments serve as a total measurement of your knowledge in a certain subject area. They reflect the “sum” of your learning and most often contribute at least in part to your final grade. These are things like final exams, midterms, and end-of-unit presentations.

Formative assessments, on the other hand, help to “form” your learning. They give your teacher an idea of how much you already know and lend insight into any gaps in your foundational knowledge. For example, if an elementary school teacher wanted to begin a unit on basic multiplication, he or she might administer a formative assessment to students, measuring basic number sense, basic addition skills, and some introductory multiplication. Because students need to master number sense and addition before they move on to multiplication, the teacher will use this assessment to measure their readiness for the new unit. The teacher will also get an idea of which students already have some exposure to multiplication, thereby allowing better differentiation of instruction to specific students.

Of course, these assessments remain relevant well past elementary school. As the content you learn becomes more and more advanced, having a general idea of your background knowledge will be more and more critical. After all, you can’t be expected to undertake a calculus-based physics class if you have gaps in your understanding of basic algebra. Teachers at every level will use formative assessments to determine student starting points, guide instruction, and identify areas in need of review.

Why should I use a formative assessment?

Teachers aren’t the only ones who should take advantage of these best teaching practices. Formative assessments, used both at the beginning of your own studying and throughout it, are the most effective way to assess your own knowledge. Although they are certainly helpful for preparing for finals and midterms, they can also be used to prepare for standardized tests. Studying for the SATs, APs, and ACTs should all begin with your own formative assessment.

These should be a cornerstone of your studying, just as they are a cornerstone of good teaching.

Are formative assessments always a test? What other forms could they take?

Formative assessments take many different forms. Sometimes they are administered like a traditional quiz or test. Other times teachers will use materials such as exit slips, learning logs, or self-assessments. Your teachers might even use general observations or class discussions to shape their formative assessments.

It can be logistically a bit more complicated to administer your own formative assessment, but it’s not impossible. You could use your notes or learning journal if you have one that’s relevant to the material you’re studying. If you are studying for a class at school, you might also use the end-of-chapter textbook questions, old exams that your teacher may provide, or create your own test questions and trade with a friend. If you’re studying for a standardized test, use the practice questions from a commercial study guide or search online for a practice test. Some commercial study guides even include a diagnostic test, which is essentially the same thing as a formative assessment.

Whatever format you choose for your formative assessment, be sure that its content closely mirrors the content areas of the class or test for which you’re studying. You can use a class syllabus or content outline to determine which specific content areas you should focus on assessing.

How do I use a formative assessment to guide my studying?

Formative assessments are a great studying tool if you know how to use them effectively. First, you will need to identify the area of knowledge that you are aiming to assess . If you are approaching an end-of-unit test in your chemistry class, you should be able to find a content summary for each chapter in the textbook. If you’re studying for a standardized test, you can find specific knowledge requirements on the test website or in a commercial study guide.

Once you know what content you will be tested on, source a test that you can use to assess your initial knowledge of it. This could be end-of-unit questions from the textbook, practice tests for a standardized test, or practice questions online.

Whatever the case may be, rather than studying first and then testing your knowledge, you will take the assessment first and then use it to shape your studying . When you take the assessment, try to imitate the testing conditions you’ll experience when you take the actual test. Try to adhere to any time constraints and use any resources that will be available in order to get the most accurate idea of your knowledge.

Next, score your assessment . As you are doing so, generalize the content areas of your incorrect answers to get an idea of which broad content areas need review. Also keep a running list of specific vocabulary or concepts that need review.

The end result of a strong formative assessment should be a list of content and concepts that will benefit most from your review . Think of it as a to-do list of sorts to help guide and shape your studying.

Finally, remember that formative assessments don’t have to end when you dive into studying . You can also use them throughout the studying process to evaluate your progress. If you start with an accurate formative assessment, study as usual, and then take another formative assessment, you should see a clear progression in your knowledge. Repeat the process of assessing and readjusting or focusing your studying as indicated to incrementally increase your score.

Although it may seem counterintuitive to test yourself before you even begin studying for something, the long term benefits are clear. By taking a formative assessment to inventory your strengths and areas in need of improvement, you facilitate a more focused and targeted approach to studying. You spend less time studying concepts you already know, and more time digging into material that you have yet to master. By repeating the process you’re more likely to see a steady progression of knowledge in the areas that need the most improvement.

Don’t let your teachers be the only ones to take advantage of strong, proven instructional practices. Apply the same methods to your own learning to maximize your potential independently.

Looking for help navigating the road to college as a high school student? Download our  free guide for 9th graders  and our  free guide for 10th graders . Our guides go in-depth about subjects ranging from academics, choosing courses, standardized tests, extracurricular activities, and much more!

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Handling Senior Year: Making a Schedule

How to Effectively Balance Your Time in High School

Should You Retake Your Standardized Tests?

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Gen ed writes, writing across the disciplines at harvard college.

• Formative Assignments

Formative writing assignments allow students to practice and get feedback on individual elements of a larger assignment before putting them all together and getting a grade. This ability to break things down into smaller steps can be really useful in Gen Ed courses, where different elements of an assignment (e.g., writing an abstract or integrating direct quotes into an essay) might be more or less familiar to different groups of students. Workshopping these assignments—or even just doing them—in class can be a great use of section, and when these smaller assignments are clearly aligned with the steps of a bigger assignment, they can help students recognize the role of process in completing larger assignments while helping teachers know which skills or steps their students need more support with.

Formative assignments work at any stage of a draft/revision cycle: 

• Before starting to write a full draft:  in-class brainstorming of questions, keeping a reading journal, summarizing sources, drafting a thesis, research proposals, annotated bibliographies, etc. 
• While writing a draft:  writing intros and conclusions, outlining, delivering elevator pitches to classmates, free writing, practicing forms of analysis, integrating sources
• During revision: peer feedback on workshop drafts, reverse outlining, topic sentence/transition exercises, citation or style exercises.

These assignments can work really well as homework that either receives informal feedback from an instructor or gets workshopped by students in small groups during class, but they   can also work great as opportunities for in-class writing . 

What it looks like: Formative Writing in a Unit of Expos

In Expos courses at Harvard, the assignments students receive grades on are "summative" ones. These summative assignments are most commonly the revised version of an essay draft that has gone through a long sequence of lower-stakes assignments, each of which scaffolds up to the revised essay and gets ungraded "formative" feedback about individual elements of the overall assignment (e.g., thesis or evidence). Taken together, the series of formative assignments for a unit and the feedback students receive   might look like this: 

• Analytical questions:  students bring in analytical questions on assigned readings and  workshop their questions in small groups   before shifting to a full-class debrief   about which questions to take up for discussion.  
• Journaling:  students keep a running account of reading and discussion notes, along with responses to occasional short prompts meant to help them think about directions for their essay (What's the most compelling analytical question you've heard so far in our unit? Why would readers be compelled by an answer to that question? What moments of the readings did you comment the most on? What would "author x" say to "author y's" argument about "z"?).  Students might submit their journal every so often as part of their participation grade, or they might just be asked to have it with them in class. 
• Summary:  students choose an assigned reading to summarize, and in class they  workshop their summaries in small groups  and perhaps revise together in class. 
• Proposals:  students submit a pre-draft response paper, where they formulate a provisional thesis and include evidence they might work with, or a brief outline, and/or imagine what a substantive counterargument to their thesis might be. These submissions might receive some individualized feedback from an instructor , or they might be the basis for more in-class peer review in small groups . 
• Essay draft w/ cover letter:  students submit a full draft of an essay, along with a cover letter where they reflect on different aspects of their process to that point (What's my thesis? What's working the best? What's an area where I'd like more feedback? If I were to start revising today, what would be my first move?). This draft gets  individualized feedback from an instructor , which is itself the basis for a  one-on-one draft conference with their instructor. 
• Workshop: students in a section all read 1–2 peer essays and provide feedback to workshopees that's modeled after the draft feedback they're receiving from the instructor. Students debrief their feedback in the in-class workshop , which ends with...
• Free writing: ...5–15 minutes of free writing, where students apply what they've learned in the workshop (e.g., patterns to emulate or avoid) to their own draft and reflect on where they're at in the revision process . 
• Reverse outlining or source integration activity: during the revision process, students get practice with different skills or elements through homework or in-class activities. Feedback on this kind of formative writing can come from the instructor, peers, or through self-assessment by the student. 

At this point,   students are close to submitting a revised draft of their essay, along with a cover letter where they reflect on different aspects of their revision process to that point (How has my thesis changed since the draft? What's now working the best? What's an area where feedback helped the most? What's an area I'd like to continue focusing on for our next essay?). This revision, like the draft, gets  individualized feedback from an instructor, but this time it's "summative feedback" in the form of comments as well as a grade. 

How this applies to courses in Gen Ed 

In Expos courses, where writing is the primary focus, there's time and space for a wide range of formative assignments for any given essay or project. That won't always be the case in Gen Ed courses, where writing assignments are part of a broader ecosystem of student work. The good news is that any opportunities for formative feedback will improve students’ experience of an assignment, and the examples listed here above can be implemented separately or in smaller configurations, depending on the assignment at hand and the timeline you’re working with.

More Resources and Tools

• DIY Guides for Analytical Writing Assignments

• Types of Assignments
• Unpacking the Elements of Writing Prompts
• Teaching the Elements of Writing Assignments
• Creating an Environment for Feedback
• Creating and Sharing Rubrics
• Peer Review
• Written Feedback on Assignments

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What is Formative and How Can it Be Used to Teach? Tips & Tricks

Formative is a real-time assessment tool designed specifically for teachers using digital learning platforms

Formative is one of the stand-out assessment tools which allows teachers and students to work digitally and in real-time.

For those education institutions already using tools like Google Classroom or Clever, this platform can easily be integrated to make assessments very simple. That means keeping track of student progress, in real-time, is possible from one place.

It's also worth noting that Formative can be accessed from a variety of devices, as it is app and web based, meaning students and teachers can work both in the classroom as well as outside of class and even school hours.

So is Formative the right assessment tool for your school?

What is Formative?

Formative is an app and web-based assessment platform which can be used across a variety of devices by teachers and students -- all with updates live as they're happening.

All that means teachers can use this tool to check class, group, or individual progress both in the classroom and beyond. That makes this a valuable resource both for checking student uptake on learning and also as a way to see knowledge and mastery levels before embarking on a new subject teaching plan.

Useful tools make tracking students over time, or live, very easy with clear metrics showing how they're doing and -- importantly -- if there is an obvious area where they are struggling and need help.

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There are a lot of digital assessment tools out there right now but Formative stands out with its ease of use, wide range of media types, and breadth of pre-made questions as well as freedom to work from scratch.

How does Formative work?

Formative requires the teacher to sign-up for an account to get started. Once this is done it can be access online or via an app for creating assessments and sharing them. Since this integrates with Google Classroom it can be an easy process to add student accounts. That said, they can work as guests but this makes longer term tracking not possible.

Once setup, teachers are able to quickly select from pre-made assessments that cover areas they may need, or use pre-written questions to build their own assessments -- or start from scratch. This makes for a wide variety of options that can vary based on how much time is available when creating that particular assessment.

Once built it's possible to share with students by sending out a URL, a QR code or by a class code -- all made easy when using Google Classroom or Clever which this is built to integrate with.

Students can then work on the assessments, either live in teacher-led scenarios, or student-led on their own time as needed. Teachers can then mark and feedback on work allowing students to progress, or not, in order to work towards mastery. All the data on students scores is then available to view by the teacher.

What are the best Formative features?

Formative is super simple to use and helpfully works across so many devices -- in the same way -- that students and teachers will find using it straight-forward no matter the device they're on. Everything is minimal, yet colorful and engaging.

There is a rich selection of ways for teachers and students to create and work within assessments. Beyond simple written questions and answers there is room for imagery, audio uploads, video submissions, number entry, URL sharing and even drawing using a touchscreen or mouse.

So, while multiple choice questions are easiest to assess, teachers have the freedom to use this tool as needed with a lot of liberty to get creative.

A student growth tracker is a useful addition which allows teachers to see, over time, how individual students are progressing by standard. This can be viewed, with other metrics, in the dashboard section which allows teachers to see student work and feedback assessments including grades, automatically or manually, as needed.

Teacher-paced mode is a useful way to work, in class, with students in a live way that lets students work through challenges with the assistance of a teacher available digitally and physically as needed -- ideal to spread attention more evenly across all levels of the class.

How much does Formative cost?

Formative offers a free option to allow teachers and students to get started with the tool but there are also more feature rich paid-for plans.

The Bronze level is free and gets you unlimited lessons, assignments and assessments, real-time student tracking, creation and managing of classrooms, plus basic integration and embedding.

Go for the Silver level, at $15 per month or $144 per year , and you get all the above plus advanced question types, grading and feedback tools, plus advanced assignment settings.

The Gold plan, priced on a quote basis, gets you all the silver features plus collaboration, unlimited data tracking, organization wide standard progress over time, results by demographics, SpED, ELL and more, common assessments, an organization wide private library, anti-cheating features, student accommodations, team management and reports, gold support and training, advanced LMS integration, SIS nightly syncs and more.

Formative best tips and tricks

Go graphical Create image led assessments that let students interact visually by completing graphic organizers -- ideal for those less able when it comes to writing.

Auto retry Only offer real feedback once students have achieved a certain level of mastery, being automatically asked to re-try until they reach mastery on their time.

Plan ahead Use assessments at the start of class to see how each student understands a topic before deciding how to teach it and target students that need extra care.

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Luke Edwards is a freelance writer and editor with more than two decades of experience covering tech, science, and health. He writes for many publications covering health tech, software and apps, digital teaching tools, VPNs, TV, audio, smart home, antivirus, broadband, smartphones, cars and much more.

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Formative Assessment in the Classroom: What It Is & How to Use It

There is a constant buzz in the news around testing and the question of whether or not students are being over-tested. No matter where you stand, determining what students know and where learning breaks down is critical to the education process. That’s where formative assessments come into play.

What Is a Formative Assessment?

Formative assessments are a fluid measure of student progress. They provide ongoing feedback that benefits both the teacher and the student. These types of assessments monitor a student’s performance during instruction in the classroom. They are unique in that they occur regularly throughout the instructional process rather than periodically at the end of a unit or semester. This allows for adjustments and collaboration based on student progress and needs.

Practicing Formative Assessment in the Classroom: What to Know

Bringing formative assessments to your classroom can help you keep up with your students and discover how to meet them where they’re at. The following strategies will help as you develop your formative assessment practices.

Think of Formative Assessment as a Verb Instead of a Noun

As you develop your strategy for progress monitoring, think about “formative assessment” as a verb or an action rather than a noun or a thing. How will you formatively assess your students over time? What types of initiatives will you undertake to get the pulse on your students’ progress? If you refine your practices now, formative assessing won’t feel like testing to your students, and they will be more successful when summative assessments roll around.

Seek Out Information Informally

This strategy is less formalized than what you might think of for a traditional assessment. It involves a feedback loop that you can start by monitoring classroom discussions, asking informal questions of your students and watching them as they work to identify areas where they might be struggling. After all, there’s plenty to learn from student interactions and behaviors that normally don’t end up in the grade book. Small or subtle hints you gather through monitoring students can signal the amount of progress you make toward your overall goals.

Give and Get Explicit Feedback

Be sure to give and get direct feedback along the way. This is the hallmark of the formative assessment process and will ensure that you are assessing for learning rather than what has already been learned. The importance of feedback relates back to the concept of thinking about formative assessment as a verb or an action. This kind of assessment is an ongoing process that includes the all-important feedback loop between you and your students, alerting you to possible challenges, giving students control over their learning, and ensuring time for you and your students to react.

Formative Assessment Resources

Formative assessments can vary in scope . They can be as short as an informal discussion or as long as a student project or written composition, but the key differentiator is how and when you use the data gained from it all. A little creativity and careful consideration can help you find solutions that make it simple to understand formative assessment outcomes (and what to do with them). Want to learn more about how Edmentum can help support your formative assessment goals? Check out Study Island , our high-impact, high-value learning program that provides quality academic support, practice, and real-time reporting. With immediate feedback, built-in remediation, and actionable data, Study Island enables you to easily monitor student progress and differentiate instruction. You can learn more about all of Edmentum’s solutions for formative assessment here .

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Formative And Summative Assessment: The Differences Explained For Teachers

Tim Handley

In this article we un-pick the differences between formative and summative assessment, when and why you should use each type of assessment, and how to get the best out of each to keep driving forward students’ learning.

Formative vs summative assessments – what is the difference?

What is formative assessment, what is summative assessment, a breakdown of the differences between formative and summative assessments, formative vs summative assessment comparison chart, how to use formative assessments in your lessons, formative assessment examples and ideas, practical tips for implementing formative assessment, summative assessment examples and ideas, practical tips for implementing summative assessment, formative vs summative assessments – the pros and cons.

Let’s start with a brief overview and then drill down for greater nuance

Formative assessments are low stakes tests designed to identify where students are in their current understanding and inform teachers about what the next teaching steps should be. Summative assessments tend to be higher stakes and used at the end of a unit to evaluate student learning against a standard or benchmark.

Formative assessment is the use of day-to-day assessments to gauge and explore pupils’ understanding of a topic. They determine student needs, which teachers use to form learning outcomes in order to prioritise student achievement and success.

It is best thought of as an assessment for   learning . 

Formative assessments are one of the teaching strategies used to help inform the learning ‘in the moment’. Formative assessment is continuous, informal and should have a central and pivotal role in every maths classroom.

If used correctly, it will have a high impact on current learning and help you guide your instruction and teaching by giving ongoing feedback on students’ progress.

Having an assessment with low stakes allows pupils to develop their skills, confidence and user experience before attempting a summative assessment with high stakes. It also makes room for self-assessment.

Summative assessment takes place after pupils’ have completed a block of work, whether that be on a term or modular basis. They are a more formal way to sum up pupil progress and are often compared against a standard benchmark.

They are best thought of as assessments  of  learning.

There are different types of summative evaluations that we carry out ‘after the event’, often periodic (rather than continuous), and they are often measured against a set standard.

Summative assessment can be thought of as helping to validate and ‘check’ formative assessment – it is a periodic measure of how children are, overall, progressing in their mathematics learning.

Formative and summative assessments differ in the following ways:

• Difference 1: Purpose : the purpose of formative assessments is to improve learning, while the purpose of summative assessments is to gain a measure of attainment (e.g. a final grade).  
• Difference 2: Frequency : formative assessment occurs regularly throughout every lesson.  Summative assessments occur at the end of a teaching-learning cycle or at the end of class.
• Difference 3: Type of Assessment : formative assessments are likely to be low-stakes and summative assessments are likely to be high-stakes.
• Difference 4: Outcome : teachers provide feedback to improve learning following formative assessments.  The outcome of a summative assessment is a final grade or score that is used as a measure of attainment.

Importantly, it is not the ‘form’ that assessment takes that determines whether it is formative or summative, instead it is how it is being used.

For example, ‘test style questions’ can be used both as formative assessment (perhaps as exit tickets – questions given to children at the end of the lesson to check understanding) or summative (perhaps as an end of an instructional unit test or check).

In all subjects, but especially in maths, we use a combination of both assessment strategies, but that formative assessment, due to its constant nature, makes up the bulk of our assessment activities.

This Venn diagram shows the difference and similarities between the two assessment types very clearly.

Formative Assessment - Set of 4 Diagnostic Quizzes for Year 6

25 multiple choice questions per quiz on Number and Place Value, Addition and Subtraction, Multiplication and Division, Fractions, Decimals and Percentages.

Formative assessment: what you need to know

Formative assessment is an intrinsic part of both teaching and pupil progression. This form of assessment does not rely upon tests and results, but rather the ability to adapt to classroom blockers as they arise. 

It should indicate what a good piece of work is and why this is the case, but it also gives you as a teacher a chance to see when things are not going so well and act upon it and see improvements. 

Good formative feedback will enable both the teacher and pupil to plan together what the next stage of their progression will be and future learning goals.

During a lesson, all adults in the classroom should be on a ‘constant assessment mission’ through interactions with pupils. 

Teachers should be moving around the room, interacting with each child, and assessing their progress towards the learning objective.

In the moment assessment can take many forms:

• You could use a question from your shared learning to assess where you need to pitch independent work, or which pupils need further support
• Perhaps you are using a hinge question in a class discussion to assess where you need to pitch the independent work or group work, or which children require further support.
• You could be use ‘exit tickets’ to assess children’s understanding at the end of a lesson

Any ‘in the moment’ assessment that is carried out should have a purpose, and then the information obtained from formative assessments can help you understand the children’s learning processes and adapt to this in future lesson plans.

Ask yourself:

• If your assessment shows that children are secure, then how are you going to deepen their learning?
• If your assessment shows that children have some misconceptions, then how are you going to support these?

There are a lot of different assessment routines you can use to keep up with the progression of your maths class.

Common examples of formative assessment include:

• Group activities
• Class projects
• Presentations

Read more: Formative assessment examples

1. Ensure every formative assessment routine has a purpose

Make sure that your assessment ‘routines’ have a purpose and use. 

For example, if you are going to do the ‘maths lesson classic’ and ask children to show you an answer on a mini-whiteboard , make sure you are actually looking at the answers given by all children. 

You should then be using these to inform the next step in your lesson and the learning for each child.

I have observed many lessons where teachers have carried out the mini-whiteboard ‘routine’, not actually looked at the responses given, and carried on with what they had planned regardless. 

Remember – it is not the activity or ‘thing’ that you do that represents effective assessment, but what you do with the information you gather from it. 

It is through effective, in lesson, formative evaluation that you can ensure that each child is supported and challenged, and that every child is  learning  rather than constantly  rehearsing  what they already know.

Read more: Adaptive teaching

2. Address the learning gaps and don’t leave potholes

I often use a ‘pothole’ analogy with the schools I work with. Imagine a local council were filling in potholes but that their road maintenance vehicles were themselves creating new holes in the road.

They wouldn’t be doing a very good job at improving the overall quality of the road surface would they?

Yet, schools often inadvertently do the same with maths. They are often very good at carrying out a plethora of intervention activities to fill gaps (or potholes) that have been ‘left’ from previous years, but, at the same time, often allow new gaps (or potholes) to be created.

Make sure that you use your ‘in the moment’ and ‘end of lesson’ assessment to help fill any new gaps that are starting to emerge. Then, at the end of the maths lesson, you formatively check that all children are secure with the objective for that lesson, and if not, you carry out some form of intervention to help address these gaps.

If you are not going to address the gaps now, then who is and when?

Read more: Same day interventions

3. Understand diagnostic assessment and how it works

Probably the most effective type of formative assessment is a multiple choice diagnostic assessment . This is when you set up your formative assessment in a deliberate way to diagnose the precise learning gaps and misconceptions that each of your students may have.

Each carefully selected incorrect option for your multiple choice answers can highlight a particular maths misconception . This design ensures that students can answer correctly only if they have a clear understanding of the topic, free from any misconceptions.

This format is not only beneficial for student understanding but also efficient for teachers. The distinct set of answers allows for quick marking, enabling students to receive immediate feedback.

The questions can be answered swiftly, typically within ten seconds, allowing their frequent use in lessons without impinging on valuable learning time. Regular use of diagnostic assessments fosters reflective learning among students, encouraging them to identify areas needing further study and revision.

Download a free diagnostic maths test (available for primary and secondary) to get you started.

Summative assessment: what you need to know

Summative assessment helps to demonstrate the extent of pupils success in meeting specific goals. It is a method than can be used to quantify student performance and achievement, and due to its data driven nature, it is a great way to provide a numerical basis for the student’s next step.

Some common examples of summative assessment include:

• End of term projects

However, whilst the principles of summative assessment are simple, there are 4 key points you need to consider before implementing it.

1. Understand the difference between your assessment framework and your assessment system

Despite the power of ‘in the moment’ formative assessment, schools do need a way to track the attainment and progress of children throughout the school. 

This means schools also need to consider the assessment framework or rubric being used i.e. what you are assessing against. This decision is often one that is taken at school (or trust) level.    

At this point you need to be clear about the different between your assessment system and the framework you are using. 

Often in working with schools we hear that they are usingClassroom Monitor, Target Tracker or School Insights for their assessment. In fact, these are all just assessment systems – a bit of software that allow you to record and track children’s progress against the assessment framework that has been chosen by your school. 

They are not what you are using to ‘assess’ but merely what you are using to record your assessment.   

These assessment systems all allow you to select (and often create your own) framework upon which to assess your children – and it is these frameworks that are vitally important.

2. Consider the balance of objectives and targets in your assessment framework

When choosing, or indeed creating, the assessment framework that you are using, look closely at how you’re balancing the objectives and target areas of mathematics within the framework.

For example, a common occurrence is that schools assess against each objective of the national curriculum. This, however, is problematic and often creates unwelcome ‘surprises’ when it comes to comparing teacher assessment against standardised summative assessment. 

An example of this is SATs tests – I have been asked to work with many schools where their assessment against the whole national curriculum does not match the performance of children on previous SATs papers.

The reason for this disparity between teacher assessment against the whole national curriculum ie. assessing against every statement of the Year 4 Maths national curriculum and performance on standardised test, is that the whole national curriculum is not weighted in the same way as the KS1 and KS2 end of key stage assessment (SATs) are.

Read more: Why your SATs interventions should not start in Year 6

At primary The KS1 and KS2 test frameworks show a clear weighting towards number based objectives.

Number, calculations and proportionality making up between 75-85% of a child’s final result (this is for a good reason – but that’s the subject of another blog post!)

Yet, most year groups have around a 50/50 split between ‘number’ objectives – i.e. number, calculations and proportionality  and ‘non-number’ objectives- i.e.- shape, space, measures and statistics.

This essentially means that a child could be legitimately marked as ‘secure’ or ‘working at aged related expectations’ against the whole national curriculum, on the basis of their strength in shape, space, measures and statistics,  whereas they wouldn’t be classed as ‘secure’ or ‘working at aged related expectations’ in a standardised test.

It is therefore important that whatever framework you use is balanced, and represents the weighting of objectives in the Test Frameworks.

There are many ways in which you can do this, including: 

• Use in-built ‘weighting’ functions of some assessment systems that allow you to weight each objective. 
• Assess against key objectives only, which overall, have the balance of number vs non-number objectives.
• Group objectives together, creating the overall numbers vs non-number balance. 
• Use a commercially available assessment framework which has the weighting work done for you.

Top 20 maths revision topics for KS2 SATS

Third Space Learning have undertaken a detailed analysis of past papers to determine the topics that appear most often on the Standardised Assessment Tests (SATs) at the end of year 6 as well as the numbers of marks allocated to these topics. This list informs the order of lessons we teach on our one to one SATs revision programme which every year supports thousands of children to achieve their best outcomes in SATs.

We recommend you use it to create your own year 6 maths revision programme too.

Focused maths revision for GCSE

At secondary school the GCSE exam board frameworks mirror the weighting at primary school towards number . However with many more strands to test the marks in final exams are more fairly divided across algebra, geometry and ratio and proportion. Only probability and statistics tend to be regularly responsible for fewer marks across the 3 GCSE maths papers .

If you’re interested in digging into the detail on the maths topics assessed at GCSE, these articles provide excellent expert analysis:

• Summary Of ALL GCSE Maths Papers 2023: Question Analysis, Highlights & Next Steps
• Question And Topic Level Analysis of All Edexcel GCSE Maths Papers 2017-2023

3. Train your teachers how to use the assessment framework

Once your school has decided on a framework to use for assessment, next comes the question of how it is actually used. 

These frameworks can be used both in a purely ‘summative’ way, or in a formative way that leads to, over time, an accurate summative assessment. 

The traditional use of these frameworks is for schools to ask for each child to be assessed against the framework at set points – for example through termly or midterm exams. 

This often leads to ‘assessment panic’ with teachers feeling overwhelmed having to create the assessment against many objectives for all children in their task in a short period of time.

If this is the only way in which these frameworks are used, then these are being used purely summatively – it is the teacher’s judgement at the end of a term/half term. 

Due to the stress of having to meet a deadline and make a judgment against each objective for all children in your class, this can often mean that these summative only teacher assessments are not as accurate as many would like.

Luckily, you can adapt these assessments very easily

How to use the frameworks formatively as well as summatively.

These frameworks can also be used in a more formative way- with teachers being encouraged to record the progress towards objectives on the framework as they are being taught .

An example of this is recording and amending judgements each week as a result of the ‘ongoing’ assessment. This leads to an ever changing snapshot of each child’s performance, which can be really powerful.

This can be used to inform interventions and subsequent teaching, and help to identify common misconceptions, giving the assessment framework used by your school both a summative and formative use. 

These assessments can then just be finalised in time for whatever deadline of ‘snapshot’ date your school set.

It is fantastic that many schools are favouring teacher assessment to provide this ‘data’. 

Teacher assessment is incredibly powerful, and gives teachers the professional autonomy that they deserve. 

4. Regular standardised tests can be used with your assessment framework

Many schools will also choose to use some form of testing alongside their assessment frameworks.

This can be seen as helping to validate teacher assessment judgements, and can also help to ensure there are no ‘nasty’ surprises when it comes to Year 6.

However, testing is only as good as the quality of the tests that you use. As we know, the development of SATs tests takes 3 years . They are also, as we all know, standardised – leading to the infamous ‘scaled score’.

Make sure that the tests your schools rely on also have the same degree of work that has gone into their development.

They should be standardised – so you know how children across the country perform, and be based on a clear test development framework, and have been trialled and refined in schools. 

Some popular tests that have been developed in this way include PUMA (by Hodder/Rising Stars Assessment), NfER tests and GL Assessments.

In a test by Rising Stars using PUMA assessment data, pupils who received one to one maths tuition from Third Space Learning made double the expect progress over 14 weeks.

Regardless of what tests are used, schools and teachers will understand that they provide a snapshot of the performance on the day the test was taken. Children, just like adults, all have ‘good’ and ‘bad’ days, and these tests should be seen as a supplement to good quality teacher assessment, not a replacement for it.

Both formative and summative assessment have a very important role to play in the classroom and in schools. However, it is very important to ensure that you find the right balance between the two approaches for your own class’s learning needs.

Constant formative assessment can prove difficult if not implemented properly, but consistent assessment of pupils strengths and weaknesses can prove invaluable in helping them to progress.

Summative assessment can often not show the whole picture of a pupils progression, but it is a fantastic way of getting a data driven overview of how a pupil has progressed and grown over a period of time.  

The goal of this article was to summarise the difference between formative and summative assessment, and the conclusion is that both approaches have their flaws, but they can also both provide a valuable insight into how a class is getting on throughout the school year. All that is left is to use assessments of both kinds to inform your teaching!

• The Myth of Expected Progress in Primary Schools
• Primary School Grades Explained
• Pupil Progress: Measuring The Impact Of The Affective Domain Across 1,750 Schools
• KS1 Assessment Frameworks Maths

DO YOU HAVE STUDENTS WHO NEED MORE SUPPORT IN MATHS?

Every week Third Space Learning’s maths specialist tutors support thousands of students across hundreds of schools with weekly maths intervention programmes designed to plug gaps and boost progress.

Since 2013 these personalised one to one lessons have helped over 150,000 primary and secondary students become more confident, able mathematicians.

Learn about the diagnostic assessment or request a personalised quote for your school to speak to us about your school’s needs and how we can help.

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Retrieval Practice: A Foolproof Method To Improve Student Retention and Recall

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FREE Guide to Hands on Manipulatives

Download our free guide to manipulatives that you can use in the maths classroom.

Includes 15 of the best concrete resources every KS1 and KS2 classroom should have.

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What is a Formative Assessment?

• Teaching Strategies, Tactics, and Methods

Formative assessments are regular, informal assessments that teachers use to assess student understanding and inform teaching strategies. The ultimate goal is to collect detailed information that can be used to improve instruction and student understanding while it’s happening. Read about formative assessments in this dedicated Teaching Wiki, including the thumbs-up formative assessment.

What does formative assessment mean?

Formative assessment in the classroom means the teacher monitors pupils’ learning by providing regular and timely feedback on what they’ve done well and what they need to improve on.

It can take various forms, from informal quizzes to verbal feedback on a piece of work. To be effective, formative assessment must occur daily during teaching and learning. It’s conducted to help teachers decide how to develop student understanding further.

One commonly used formative assessment method is What Well Well? (WWW) and Even Better If? (EBI). This feedback means that pupils know what they’ve achieved to date and what they need to do next to progress in their learning.

Formative assessment is sometimes referred to as assessment for learning and usually involves diagnostic testing of some kind; this allows the teacher and the pupil to identify gaps in the pupils’ learning and then target those gaps by adjusting their planning sequences of learning to address those gaps. Depending on the subject and topic, this might involve revising previously taught concepts, practicing particular skills, or extending existing knowledge.

Formative assessment takes place in the run-up to a summative evaluation like an end-of-topic test, meaning that it is constructive in the way the results are used rather than the style of the assessment itself.

What’s the difference between formative and summative assessments?

Another way of explaining what formative assessment means is by explaining the differences between formative and summative assessment.

Summative assessment ‘sums up’ learning at the end of a set period of time, such as a term. It will also be linked to specific learning aims in the Australian Curriculum.

Summative assessments for many subjects take the form of end-of-topic tests. Depending on the subject and topic, they can be in a variety of forms, such as:

• a written test;
• a conversation;
• or an observation.

For that reason, responses to a summative assessment could be in a range of media, including writing, photography, artwork, and audio or visual recordings. Whatever form is taken will summarize pupils learning at a given time. Typically, this data is used to record and track progress. It is also used for reporting to parents and pupils.

One good way to remember the difference between formative and summative assessments is that While a summative assessment can be seen as an ‘assessment of learning,’ a formative assessment can be seen as an ‘assessment for learning.’So let’s find out more about the differences.

Formative Assessments

Formative assessments are a method of assessing pupils. While learning is happening, rather than waiting until the end of a term or topic, this is commonly referred to as assessment for learning or AfL.

AFL evaluates the comprehension levels and learning needs of students. It is typically integrated with in-lesson learning; it doesn’t necessarily produce a score like lettered grades or numbered levels. Instead, formative assessments can help increase children’s awareness of how they learn, which can help with their sense of responsibility and independence in learning.

A task or activity is not formative unless the information it provides is used to progress learning. What makes an assessment formative is what the teacher does with the knowledge to inform their teaching on that topic.

What is a Formative Assessment framework?

A formative assessment framework provides educators with a clear structure to achieve an organized formative assessment. The framework offers both children and teachers a better focus on what children need to learn and what you, as an educator, should teach.

The formative assessment framework includes data that will help inform both learning and instruction to help structure your lessons in the best way for your class. In addition, the data from formative assessments allow educators to make an informed decision about the next steps; many studies have shown that decisions based on data are better educated than those made without. By the term ‘next steps,’ we mean the measures to put into place to help a child flourish within their learning – these decisions will be made via the formative assessment results.

The formative assessment framework usually follows this process:

• Assessing and conveying standards.
• Using the standards to collect and assess data to see where children are performing within the curriculum and current guidelines.
• The teacher then shares the feedback with students with detailed feedback.
• Based on the feedback, children will then form their formative assessment by using the comments made by the teacher to determine what they should focus on learning.

Why are Formative Assessments essential in the classroom?

Formative assessments allow children to manage activities, adjust their learning, and track their learning goals. Not only does it give educators a good amount of time to provide feedback to children regularly, but it also allows children to have their input in their learning.

Origins of Formative Assessments:

Formative assessments have been common in classrooms since the 1960s. However, they gained fresh interest following the pioneering research ‘Inside the Black Box: Raising standards through classroom assessment’ in the late 1990s.

Formative Assessment In the Classroom Examples

The ways formative assessments can be carried out are very broad. It can be as simple as teachers getting children to raise their hands if they have understood a new concept. Or an extravagant self-assessment writing exercise.

Here are some examples of formative assessments methods that are perfect in any classroom:

• Analyzing student work- either self-assessment or peer assessments
• Strategic questioning – ask students high-order questions to assess their understanding based on their answers
• 3-way summaries – students write three summaries in response to a topic of increasing length to test understanding of the content
• Sharing in groups – students discuss a topic in pairs while teachers make a note of their discussions
• Classroom polls- does everyone understand?
• One-minute papers -students write briefly about a topic, summarising their vital learning
• Spontaneous quizzes and voting exercises- see what children know about the topic through quizzes and voting exercises
• Mind maps- get children to summarise what they already know about a topic in a creative and visual way
• Summary Paragraphs- short writing exercises to see how well students have understood an idea
• Visual exercises- get children to draw something or create a collage based on your topic
• Q and A Exercises- get kids to ask questions and see which of their classmates know the answers
• Short presentations-get the children to give short presentations on the topic to show what they have learned

By trying these formative assessment methods, you’ll be able to keep track of children’s progress in a fun and less formal way. You’ll also create an approach that gives children some input with their learning by providing them with useful and consistent feedback. These methods are great to try in the classroom and accommodate both whole-class and individual assessments.

After using one of these formative assessment methods, you should follow the framework, which involves setting a task, examining children’s work, informing the teacher of knowledge and instruction, and teaching methods.

Benefits of Formative Assessments in the classroom:

As well as helping teachers to understand how well students have taken on board the topic and adjust their teaching to support them further if necessary, formative assessments have lots of benefits for helping kids learn:

• Students can use the results to improve their learning.
• The results allow teachers to adjust their teaching quickly.
• Improves children’s academic achievement and progress.
• Enhances students motivation.
• Gives children clear learning goals.
• Increases student engagement.
• Helps you deliver more targeted and personalized feedback to children.
• The results help you make an informed decision by using accurate data.
• Helps students to precisely understand the level they are working at – grades to fit with everyone, and formative assessments allow them to put their level of understanding in context.
• Reduce the learning gaps – by using the results of formative assessments to adjust teaching, you will ensure that everyone in the class gets the most out of your lessons.
• It gives children a good idea of how they are progressing and what they need to do to improve.

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Learn about different ways to see your students' responses, change grades, delete responses, give feedback, and close assignments.

Navigate to Responses

You can navigate to the "Responses" tab from within the formative itself or directly from the "Formatives" page

Within the formative

Click on the name of the formative you want to see

At the top of the screen, click on "Responses"

From the Fromatives page

Locate the formative on the Formatives page

On the grid of classes, click on the cell that corresponds with your class

Choose "View Responses"

Icons on the Responses tab

Icons next to student names will indicate the student's participation status (see chart below). A color-coded display of student performance on each question will appear in real time as the students enter their responses to auto-graded questions, and icons on the color-coded cells will indicate a need for the teacher's additional attantion.

Here is an example of a formative in progress on the Responses tab:

Participation Icon Chart

Response color-code and icons.

Autograded responses are color-coded based on the standard color scheme displayed below. If you are a Silver/Gold user, you have the option of adjusting these thresholds.

By system default, Red responses are incorrect (0%-24%), orange (25%-49%) and yellow (50%-74%) are partially correct, and green is correct (75%-100%). ​

Gray bars will appear if a student answered a question that cannot be auto-graded and requires a manual grading by the teacher. This will happen if the question does not support auto-grading (for example, an audio/video response), or if the teacher did not set an answer key for auto-grading. ​

Speech bubbles on the student response bars are indicators that there is feedback on that response! ​

Blank white spaces on a formative that has yet to be submitted signify unanswered questions. Once the formative is submitted, these blank white spaces will change color and a 🚫 symbol will appear inside the cell indicating that the response was submitted unanswered:

Formative Action Icons

The Responses tab also presents the option to take actions on the formative's assignment settings.

Click the icon presented next to the class' title to reveal the dropdown menu (could be lightning-bolt, suitcase, or calendar icons) ​

The dedicated help center articles elaborating on these actions are linked below, and in brief:

Additional Settings : Change the assignment settings for the formative in real-time. Note that you will need to adjust the settings for each class separately.

Force Submissions : Submits the assignment for all the students in the class, regardless of progress or completion of the formative.

Pause Assignment : Temporarily disable access to the assignment so you can clarify a point, make a change, or if class was suddenly disrupted.

Close Assignment : Unless you've allowed edits after submission, closing a formative will prevent any more responses.

The Responses tab offers multiple sorting and presentation options to organize the information displayed. Sorting order preference that is chosen will be saved and the Responses tab will continue to display this chosen order every time the teacher navigates to the Responses tab until the teacher actively changes the preference to something else.

Top Menu Options

The menu at the top of the page gives you the option to Group by standards to see how your students performed on the assessment according to tagged standards. Simply toggle on the button for the view to adjust accordingly.

Clicking the "Settings" button will display the options to:

Change between viewing scores by percent or by points

Show or hide responses by archived students

Hide student names (Silver/Gold feature): Protect privacy if you're sharing your screen. Use this in tandem with randomized student sorting for added privacy.

Clicking the "Sort By" button at the top right corner will give you a wide arrey of sorting options.

By default your view will sort by "Active" students first (active students are those who have the formative open on their devices at that particular moment, they will also have a green live indicator next to their avatar to indicate they are active).

Other sorting options include: by student name (first or last, A-Z or Z-A), by submission date or by scores. Silver/Gold users can also randomize the list's order.

Filter Responses

The main view of the "Responses" tab displays all your students' overall performance on a formative. From this "Totals" view you have the option to drill down further and view all student responses for a single question, or zero-in on a single student's response. In this section you can read about:

Viewing all responses/scores for a formative

Viewing responses/scores for specific questions

Viewing one student's responses/scores

Viewing responses sorted by standards is covered in this article .

View all responses/scores for a formative:

The "Responses" tab will initially open on the "Totals" view, which looks like this:

The average score for questions is shown at the top to give you an idea of how the class is doing with each question. All students show up under their class/org. From here you can navigate to other views.

View responses/scores for a specific question:

From the "Totals" view click on any single question number at the top of the grid and you'll be redirected to the specific question's gallery view. This gallery view displays all student responses for that particular question only. This view also allows you to see your students' responses as they enter them in real-time!

From this view you can also select individual responses or multiple responses by check-marking the checkbox within the response tiles, and perform actions such as sending feedback, manually grading, and more (continue reading to learn about these options!)

View Question Details

Clicking the 3 vertical dots next to the question prompt on the far right will present you with a dropdown menu that offers the options to zoom responses in or out, as well as show the question details, i.e. the correct answer(s), the point value, and the standards tagged to the question.

View response by individual student

By clicking on an individual student response tile - either from the main "Totals" view or from the individual question Gallery view - a right-side panel will open on your screen, allowing you to interact with that student's response. From this window you can adjust scores manually, send your student real-time or delayed feedback, and even clear the student's response if needed.

Clicking the sideways arrows next to the question number at the top left corner of this right-side panel will allow you to navigate to the previous or the next question to view the response to it by the same student.

Alternatively, clicking the up or down arrows around a student's name within the right-side panel will allow you to navigate to the previous or next student in your class roster to view their response to the same question.

You can enlarge the right-side panel to full screen, which is helpful for checking longer answers like Drawings or long Free Responses. Click on the square icon at the top of the panel to enter full-screen mode for a single response.

Student attempt count

If you set your formative to return scores instantly on auto-graded questions that do not require keyboard entries, students will have the option to check if their answer is correct as they take the formative. Formative will record the amount of attempts made by the student and will display the number of attempts on the answer tiles in this view

Frequency Chart

From this singular question view, you can also open the Responses Frequency Chart. This allows you to see how many students gave a particular response to a question. To access the Frequency chart view, click the "Frequency" button to view the Frequency chart which will present you with additional response data for the following question types:

Multiple Choice

Multiple Selection

Inline Choice

Using the "Filters" button you can define which classes to showcase in the Frequency Chart. You can choose to view the results for one class, a few classes, or all at the same time. You can also toggle the "save filters" button at the bottom of the panel to save your filters as the default moving forward (or turn the default off by un-toggling it).

Use the Settings button to set your desired results parameters. You can choose to:

View scores by points or percentages

Hide or show student names

Show or hide archived students

Show Overall Bar

Show overall average

Show filtered average ​

Within the Frequency Chart view you can hover over the frequency bar to reveal the class name, the response percentage and the student count for each of the response options.

Clicking on the bars within the frequency chart will open the right side panel where you can view the full list of students who provided this response, adjust everyone's score at once, send them all instant or delayed feedback at once, or even remove their responses if needed.

Any answers that received Partial Credit are also marked clearly on the frequency chart with a yellow indicator:

View responses from one individual student too all questions

You can look at a singular student's submission for all question on a formative in one view as well. This is helpful if you want to grade one student at a time or go over an assignment with an individual student.

From the Responses tab, click on the student's name or on the total points/percentage cell next to their name.

A side panel will appear with their responses and scores.

Scroll to see all of that student's responses.

View responses by class and guest students

If you have assigned a formative to multiple classes, they will each show separately on the Responses tab. Students for each class will be nested under their class heading.

If "guest students" completed the formative, those results will be visible under "Guest Students." Guests are not associated with a class and therefore appear in a separate list.

Please note: We do not recommend using guest codes with students who have a formative account as guest logins are temporary, one-use logins. Guest students can not access the formative again once they've exited it, and if deleted - their scores can not be restored. Please have your students log in using their account credentials, and use guest codes only if absolutely necessary.

Change scores

If you created an answer key for a question, it will automatically be scored on the Responses tab. You can change the score or, as a Silver/Gold user, add answers to the answer key for certain question types.

Click on a single student's response to expand it to the right-side panel. From there you can type in a score out of the total number of points, or simply move the score bar.

Silver/Gold users can also add manually-graded responses to the answer key with a single click. This will update your answer key so that other students with the same response are auto-graded as correct!

Note: An answer key must have been defined on a question for the system to offer you to add another response to it from this view. If you haven't defined an answer key for auto-grading in advance, you will need to manually choose the student responses and grade them. You can use Group Scoring (see below)

Group scoring.

We have recently introduced a new design to this capability! Instead of clicking the circle next to the students' names, a checkbox will appear on the top right corner of the student's response card to check-mark and multi-select students. In the meanwhile:

Manually scoring students one by one can be a daunting mission. Formative makes it easier and faster by allowing the teacher to select a group of students and score them with one click!

Click a specific question number.

Check the check box next to the students' names for all the responses you'd like to group score, or click "all" to select all students for that question. You can also hold down Ctrl or Cmnd on your keyboard to multi-select response cards.

Adjust the score in the right-side panel, and all responses chosen will be scored at once!

NOTE: Multi-select will only pick up students from classes with an expanded view. If you're scoring multiple classes at once, expand the view for all the classes you're scoring to include the students in the multi-select.

Give Feedback

From the Responses tab, you can comment on an individual response or, if you are a Silver/Gold user, give group feedback.

To give feedback for one response, click on that answer. A side panel will appear with the student's response and score. Type your message into the "feedback" section at the bottom of the panel. To make sending feedback even quicker and easier, your three most recent unique feedback messages will be displayed below the feedback section, you can click on any of them to quickly enter them into the feedback section. No worries, you will have the option to edit them before hitting "send". ​

You can also pin recent feedback messages you want to pop-up for you as options every time! Simply click the small pin icon:

Feedback appears to the student as a notification and they can respond to it in Formative as long as the assignment is still open or if you allow them to view after submission. (These are options that can be adjusted in the Additional Assign Settings .) You can delay feedback if you want to type it now but have it appear later, for instance after the assignment is closed.

Group feedback, a Silver/Gold feature, can be sent to multiple students by selecting multiple response tiles simultaneously:

Check the check box next to the names of the students you'd like to send group feedback to, or click "all" to select all students for that question. You can also hold down Ctrl or Cmnd on your keyboard to multi-select response cards.

Type your feedback and hit send (or select "Delayed feedback" before sending if you wish).

When feedback has been sent or received an icon will appear on the response bubble. You can easily tell who sent the last feedback message, the teacher or the student, by the color of the icon: Red icons will appear when the last message is from the student, and Blue icons will appear when the last message is from the teacher.

Remove a Response

You can remove a student's response to the entire formative at once or to individual questions.

Remove an individual response by a student

Click on the individual response to open it on the right-side panel (this can be either from the response-tiles gallery view or from the responses grid)

Click on the triple dot menu within the right-side panel

Choose "Clear Response" from the dropdown menu

Remove all responses for a student:

From your main responses tab, click on the student to expand their full submission in the right side panel

Click on the triple dot menu within the right side panel

Choose "Remove Responses" from the dropdown menu

Force-submit assignments

Submissions.

When students complete a formative, they are given a prompt to submit it. You can watch students answer in real time from the Responses tab. There will be a green checkmark next to their name once they have submitted the assignment.

If a student did not submit the formative for any reason, you can submit it on their behalf.

Force-submit for individual students

To force submit for one student, click on that student's name. From the side panel, select the dropdown and then select "Force submission."

Force-submit for the entire class or multiple classes

Select the lightning bolt icon next to the class name.

From the dropdown, select "Force submissions."

A pop-up will appear with options:

"Grade empty responses zero": You can have unanswered questions automatically graded as zeroes or leave them ungraded.

Select students: Students who did not submit will be automatically selected. If you select all and have opted to mark unanswered questions as zero, it will ensure that even those who submitted will have their unanswered questions auto-graded.

Click "Submit" to confirm.

You will be prompted to proceed and given the option to change your selection for grading empty responses zero. Click proceed.

Unsubmit an assignment

You can unsubmit individual student formatives if you wish to allow them to retake an assignment:

From the main Responses tab, making sure you are on the "Totals" view - click on the student whose work you want to unsubmit

Within the right side panel, click on the triple dot menu

Choose "Undo Submission" and proceed to confirm

Close an assignment

Closing the assignment will execute the additional assign settings for closed assignments. More about how to close a formative and troubleshooting is in this article .

From the Responses tab, you can close an assignment by clicking on the lightning bolt dropdown and selecting "Close assignment."

If the assignment has a red padlock icon, it means it's already closed. You can reopen it if you need to by following the same steps and selecting "Open assignment."

Closing the assignment will not automatically force submit so if you open it again, it will allow students who did not submit to complete their formative.

What's next?

Enable re-dos and retakes

Remove responses

View responses grouped by standards