28 Best Formative Assessment Examples for Teachers
September 24, 2024
If you’re a teacher building a classroom built on student-centered pedagogy—where your students and their abilities help to determine the pace and breadth of the learning environment—you have to know how your students are absorbing the information you teach them along the way. That’s where formative assessment comes in. Formative assessments—evaluating the development of your students as they progress—will help you understand if your teaching methods are working and, if so, for how many students in your class. Below you’ll find 28 examples of formative assessment.
Teachers often want to know:
- How many of my students are able to demonstrate knowledge and use of the course content?
- To what degree are my students capable of displaying proficiency with the course content?
- What objectives and concepts need more time and attention in the classroom?
- Which pedagogical techniques have been effective for this group of students? And do we need to employ other tactics to convey course content more effectively?
You can tackle these questions with different formative assessments. Games, quizzes, group conversations, and one-on-one chats with students are all ways to meet your students where they are—and determine how you can better assist them in meeting or exceeding the course goals and objectives.
In this post, we’ll dive into 28 different ways that teachers at any level—elementary, middle, high school, and university—can assess student growth and progress. Formative assessment can not only act as an evaluation tool that demonstrates student progress, it can also act as a teaching tool, working to reinforce knowledge that students have already absorbed by putting that knowledge into practice. It really is an indispensable tool that can be used multiple times throughout a semester or academic year. You and your students might just have some fun with it, too!
1) Intro and Exit Slips
Giving students a quick five minutes to pause and quietly reflect can make a world of difference. Start the lesson by having each student pick up a half sheet of paper, and ask them to write out what they remember from the past week, from the first several weeks of the course, or simply from your previous lesson. Let them know it won’t be graded. It can be anonymous if that fits your needs. Have students hold onto their half sheets until the end of class.
Then, at the end of that day’s lesson, ask them to put the information from that day’s lesson into context with what they wrote about at the start of class on the back side of their half sheet of paper. Ask: how does the information we learned today fit together with what you’ve already learned in this course?
Collect the responses at the end of the class and make a list of the content areas that are most prevalent in the responses. How do they line up with your learning objectives? What’s missing in the responses? Work to address those areas in future lessons.
You can also obviously split this into two sheets of paper or whatever configuration is most convenient.
2) Teacher/Course Feedback + Evaluation
One way of conducting a formative assessment without putting students on the spot is by having them conduct an evaluation of you, the teacher, and the course in general.
Similar to Intro and Exit Slips, you’ll give students time at the start or end of the lesson to reflect on a series of questions about you and your teaching. This can also be anonymous to help preserve students’ ability to speak honestly about you and your performance. You should let them know that this assessment is meant to help you be a better teacher, so they should be honest while being constructive. When it comes to student evaluations, I also like to joke that if they have something to say about my hair or the sound of my voice, that isn’t super helpful. But! If they want to help me do my job better by telling me what helps them learn, that would be awesome. Students tend to respond well when you tell them specifically that this exercise is designed to help you help them better.
Questions to get you started:
-What activities do you remember most from this section? Why did those activities stick with you?
-Which things that I did helped me understand and remember the information in our course?
-What do I do (or what happens in the class) that distracts from your ability to remember the things we’re learning?
-Which concepts have been most difficult for you to understand and remember? Are there any questions you still have about those concepts?
Best Formative Assessment Examples
3) Think, Pair, Share
Think, Pair, Share is a classic activity that works to help cement student learning, provides an environment to build community, and facilitates assessment! What’s not to love?
Have students think independently about the target of your assessment. You could ask about a specific concept you wanted them to learn or you could ask an open-ended question about the course content in general.
Then, pair students with a partner, and have them share their responses with one another, learning together about what it is they have learned about the concept or up to this point in the course. Ask them to synthesize their shared knowledge and to find commonalities, differences, or new understandings based on what they shared with their partner.
Finally, invite the pairs to share their group experience with the rest of the class. This can promote full class discussion, which can, in turn, invite further assessment on the basis of a full class conversation.
4) Creating a Shared Labor Contract
One way to assess student labor is to invite students into the self-assessment process at the start of assignments and academic calendars (semesters, trimesters, years, etc.). Professor Asao B. Inoue develops the idea of the shared labor contract, including how those contracts can be created, in his book Labor-Based Grading Contracts.
The idea, rooted in antiracism and student-centered pedagogy, provides students the opportunity to determine an assessment of their effort on a project or in a course based on the labor, time, and perceived effort they expended into the work—among other factors. Students and teachers work together to create the contract at the start of a learning period. Developed collaboratively, it helps students to understand precisely how they will be assessed at the end of that learning period or project. Students are then invited to self-reflect on the effort they could bring to the work, ultimately discovering for themselves (and you!) what that work translated into.
Best Formative Assessment Examples
5) Building a Borrow/Lend Log
A great way to assess student contributions to course discussions (both internalized and externalized) is to incorporate a “borrow/lend log” into your course curriculum.
At the start of the learning period, students are given a worksheet with weekly rows that provide space for the three things they “borrowed” and three things they “lent” to the class. Every week, give students reminders to write in the log when they feel they’ve learned something formative from another person (and be sure to note who it was!). They should also note three times they “lent” something positive, insightful, or helpful to the class, and why that contribution was worthwhile.
Check in on the borrow/lend log weekly. Students can chat in pairs or small groups about their work, and report out to the class—or to you alone—verbally or with a written reflection. To add a “summative” component, students can give themselves a mock “pass/fail grade” at the end of the unit and reflect on their personal assessment.
6) 3X Summarization
Ask students to write three summaries of varying lengths:
-One in 10-15 words
-One in 30-50 words
-Another in 75-100 words
The differing lengths of summaries require students to conceptualize information in different ways. Have them share their examples with peers and then out loud with the class! Ask them to track the changes between the different lengths of summaries. Ask them: what do we notice about what we include and don’t include in each length of summary?
7) Problem Solving
Ask students to anonymously write in questions about things they don’t understand in the current unit. “Crowdsource” answers by asking students to explain, in their own words, the answer to the question.
Best Formative Assessment Examples
8) Reverse Troubleshooting
Similar to Problem Solving above, ask students to write out 3–5 questions or issues others might have with the course content. Then, have those students write the answers to those problems or issues and create a “troubleshooting document” for the entire class in a shared Google Doc or on a large piece of paper in the class.
9) Self-Graded Quizzes
Since formative assessments are meant to understand where students are in their learning—and to help teachers address and adapt course content—self-graded quizzes are a great way to ask students to recall information without affecting their grade.
Give a normal quiz, and then go through the answers together, instructing and providing time for students to write the correct answers in the margin along the way. Collect the quizzes to assess areas that need review.
Best Formative Assessment Examples
10) Work It Out Whiteboards (Or Chalkboards!)
Working in groups, students go up to the whiteboard (or chalkboard) in the classroom. Each group tackles a different question or problem, out loud, together, while the other groups are working, as well. Then, each group shares their responses to the question, their process for arriving at the answer, and any questions from the class.
You can ask each group the same question or a series of different questions to elicit different results.
11) Draw It!
Instruct students to choose a concept from a recent lesson and to draw it in a picture.
12) Build It!
Provide simple building materials like popsicle sticks, cardboard, and craft items (think: pom-pons, sparkles, yarn, pipe cleaners). Ask students to build something based on their experience with the course content. It could be a concept, a moment in history, a depiction of a story—the only limit is their imagination. Have each student share their creation with the class, and talk about why the different creations help them to understand the course content better.
Best Formative Assessment Examples
13) Write Me a Letter
Ask students to write you an anonymous letter asking questions, providing feedback, and reflecting for you on the way your teaching is working or not working for them.
14) Crumple and Throw
Give students five minutes at the start of class to think of the biggest question or questions they have at the start of class. When the five minutes are up, tell everyone to crumple up their paper into a ball and throw it at you as you sit at the front of the class. It’s a fun way to get out a little frustration—and then you open and answer the questions.
15) Reading Memo
After reading a book, short story, article, essay, or poem, ask students to write someone else in the class a “reading memo” to provide a quick, one-page summary of the text, as if their peer hadn’t also read it and needed to know the point. Ask: what information was necessary to keep in the memo? What did you choose to keep and what did you choose to keep out? Why?
Best Formative Assessment Examples
16) Body Scale
Write a scale from 1–10 on the whiteboard or chalkboard, and ask students to come up and sort themselves on a scale from 1–10 based on how well they think they understand the current unit. Ask: why did you choose this position on the scale? Then, turn the whiteboard over to them. Instruct them to write what one thing they understand and one thing they don’t understand on the board.
17) Emoji Scale
Similar to the Body Scale above, print out or draw different popular emoji reactions and place them in various areas around the room. Ask students specific questions about course content, like a pop quiz, and then have them run to the emoji that best represents their confidence about the answer.
Have folks in the confident groups answer the questions, as a form of reinforcement and review.
Best Formative Assessment Examples
18) Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down Thermometer
During a lecture or lesson, stop yourself and ask students to give you a thumbs down, thumbs down, or “thumb in the middle” to indicate whether or not they understand what you’re teaching.
19) 1–5 Thermometer
Similar to the Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down exercise, pause during a lesson and ask students to raise their hands and give you a 1–5 ranking with their fingers based on how well they’re understanding the lesson. Do the same while asking them how well you’re teaching the content.
20) Kahoot Quizzes
Use the Kahoot app to make gamified quizzes to stir up excitement and friendly competition in the classroom.
Best Formative Assessment Examples
21) Quizlet Live
Use Quizlet Live to build a fun, hands-on, game-based quiz to get students thinking—and demonstrating to you how much they know.
22) Pop PowerPoint or Prezi
Give students (working independently or in small groups) 15 minutes to build a one-slide PowerPoint or Prezi presentation on a specific topic from the current lesson. Groups or individuals should present the information to the class, with the goal of teaching everyone as much as possible about the concept. Have students vote on the most informative presentation.
Best Formative Assessment Examples
23) Use Flubaroo and Google Forms to Build Meaningful Statistics
Create a quiz in Google Forms and use Flubaroo and Google Sheets to give yourself meaningful statistics on student retention and understanding.
24) Tell it to your parents, grandparents, or another adult
Ask students to give a quick summary of an important idea. This should be as if they were telling it to their parents, grandparents, or another adult.
25) Teach it to a little kid
The above exercise is also great when paired with its counterpart: teaching to a younger kid. Ask students to teach a lesson to child in a grade much younger than they are. How would they do it? Then, if you combine it with “Tell it to your parents,” ask students how they needed to change their thinking and delivery of the topic to make it make sense to these different audiences.
Best Formative Assessment Examples
26) Improvised check-ins
Take time for simple, improvised check-ins during lectures or lessons. Ask students to summarize what you’re talking about. Make space for questions or misunderstandings. Ask students directly what was unclear or what you skipped over too quickly. Redirect and recover.
27) Circle/X Flip Cards
Give students index cards with an empty black circle on one side and an X on the other. Instruct them to flip the card to the circle when they have “complete” understanding of an idea. Ask them to flip it to the X when they’re missing the point of a lesson. Students can do this soundlessly and without speaking out loud in front of the class. Take time to observe throughout the lesson without calling out specific responses; adjust as necessary.
You can do the same thing with the colors green and red. Green means “got it!” Red means “stop/slow down!” Use the colors to adjust your teaching on the fly.
28) Do the assignment yourself
Oftentimes, we might assign projects or tests to students with the expectation that they can simply do what we tell them. Try doing your assignment first yourself. The general rule is: if it’s easy for you, it’s hard for them. If it’s hard for you, it’s impossible for them. Adjust/pare down assignments accordingly.
Best Formative Assessment Examples – Additional Resources
