How do you use formative assessments

Exit slips can take lots of forms beyond the old-school pencil and scrap paper. The size of the stacks is your clue about what to do next. No matter the tool, the key to keeping students engaged in the process of just-walked-in or almost-out-the-door formative assessment is the questions.

Ask students to write for one minute on the most meaningful thing they learned. You can try prompts like:. Or skip the words completely and have students draw or circle emojis to represent their assessment of their understanding.

Low-stakes quizzes and polls: If you want to find out whether your students really know as much as you think they know, polls and quizzes created with Socrative or Quizlet or in-class games and tools like Quizalize , Kahoot , FlipQuiz, Gimkit , Plickers , and Flippity can help you get a better sense of how much they really understand. Kids in many classes are always logged in to these tools, so formative assessments can be done very quickly.

Because you can design the questions yourself, you determine the level of complexity. When you shape those questions in a way that stimulates student thinking above the simple recall level, you also have a perfect tool for formative assessment. These questions not only stimulate more engaging discussions, you also see whether they truly grasp the nuances of a subject.

Ungraded check-ins: Allow students to engage in multiple iterations on their papers or presentations and use verbal feedback or comments in documents to provide specific, detailed and constructive feedback along the way. For example, if a formal presentation will be required as an end assessment in a subject, you can organize mini practice sessions to help the student improve their presentation skills.

Because the student has received good guidance along the way, the result will be a much stronger final presentation. Self-assessments: Ask students to reflect on their own learning process and articulate what they do well, what they struggle with, what they have learned and what they feel they still need to learn in order to meet course goals or standards.

Student-generated questions: Ask students to develop their own questions as they do a reading assignment, then ask them to share their questions with a partner or small group. Have the small group vote on the best questions then share their top picks with the larger class.

Group Participation 3. Later, during recess the teacher observes two students resolving a sharing situation independently and makes a note about it to add to his records. Classroom Embedded Formative Assessment in Transitional Kindergarten The following scenarios assume only one adult is present.

She observes their entrance and records brief notes about their progress. During calendar, the teacher monitors students as they rote count together, she is concerned that some are not counting accurately. Later, as they are eating, she asks intentionally selected students to count for her—assisting as necessary, but noting their performance.

During shared literacy, the teacher reviews and models the concept of rhyme. He then presents several pairs of words from the read aloud and asks students to signal whether they rhyme or not. If the words do not rhyme, they work to find a pair that does.

As the teacher dismisses students to line up, he tells the group that they will play a rhyming game on the way out the door, and each student has a turn to either give a rhyming word or to signal whether two words rhyme.

He moves quickly and scaffolding as needed so everyone feels successful. During a mathematics whole group gathering, the teacher reviews one-to-one correspondence. He monitors students to ensure that they are engaged in choral responses as they count objects together.

He asks them to count three small objects. If students are successful, he notes it. If they struggle, the teacher also has important evidence and has had an opportunity to adjust his approach before providing additional instruction. During free exploration, the teacher observes and notes student choices as usual. In addition, she stops briefly to interact with several students individually.

This time she has targeted several Dual Language Learners to note progress in sentence production and vocabulary growth. She quickly notes their responses to be filed later. Letter and number recognition charts both letters and numbers in both sequential and random order and letters in both upper and lower case Small books with print and pictures for informal checks on Concepts about Print: Where to begin writing or reading, going from left to right; Where to go after the end of the line return, sweep ; The print, not the picture, carries the message; Word by word pointing one-to-one correspondence ; Concept of a letter, word, sentence; Concept of first and last part of the word, sentence, story ; Letter order in words is important; There are first and last letters in words; Upper and lower case letters have purpose; and, Different punctuation marks have meaning.

Blank index cards with engaging stickers or stamps to prompt brief student writing or dictation. 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.