Formative Assessment Modules

Formative assessment practices are those that provide teachers and students with information about learning as it develops—not just at the end of a project, unit, or year. The information is formative because it enables adjustments that deepen learning: Teachers use formative assessment to make adjustments to instruction, and students use the feedback from formative assessments to make revisions to their work and their approaches to it.

As a result, students learn more.

This website is designed to provide teachers with formative assessment practices that can be plugged into any curriculum and instruction. Each technique has been tested in classrooms and online, and has been shown to support effective teaching as well as deepen student learning. Learn more about this resource and the editors.

Self-Assessment

Feedback Breaks

Pre-assessment is done at the beginning of learning something new. The purpose of a pre-assessment is to collect information about what students already know and can do and any gaps or misconceptions that must be addressed.

It can take a variety of forms, including a conversation aimed at making connections to previous knowledge from school, family and/or community, creating a concept map, multiple choice questions, writing to a prompt, or performing a skill.

Pre-assessment becomes formative when the results are used to guide decisions about instruction and learning. It is especially powerful when the assessment, in whatever form, explicitly targets common misconceptions, perhaps by drawing on learning progressions, thereby enabling the teacher to plan to address them directly, as needed. The results of pre-assessment approaches can also be useful to students, who can use them to set goals for their learning.

Resources

Traffic Lights
Students use green, yellow, and red buttons to show how familiar they are with a new concept.

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Concept Map
A diagram that visually organizes concepts and the relationships between them.

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One Question
Ask students to answer just one multiple-choice question that gets at a central idea related to the topic you are about to introduce.

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Diagnostic Synectics
Use a visual analogy to get a feel for what students think they know about a new topic.

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English Learning Formative Assessment
A reading comprehension assessment tool teachers can use with English learners or struggling readers.

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Formative self-assessment enables students to thoughtfully reflect on the quality of their work-in-progress and their learning, and determine next steps. Self-assessment is feedback, not a matter of having students assign themselves grades or scores. That is summative self-evaluation, which, unlike the formative type, has not been shown to benefit students.

Formative self-assessment is a core element of self-regulation, as it involves awareness of the goals of a task, checking one’s progress toward them, and making adjustments or revisions as needed. Students can give themselves useful feedback on products, such as papers and presentations, as well as on processes and procedures, such as problem-solving. Their feedback tends to be of the highest quality when it is grounded in explicit, relevant, evaluative criteria for their work that students have had an opportunity to discuss or apply to exemplars or otherwise engage with them so that they understand them. It is also important that the self-assessment be followed by opportunities to relearn and/or revise. Students tend to be honest in their self-assessments and to revise if they know they have an opportunity to improve. In fact, in order to avoid having students say or write what they think you want to hear, it is sometimes advisable for you not to collect their self-assessments. When carefully scaffolded, self-assessment can be feedback for oneself from oneself, with no additional audience.

Resources

Two Stars and a Wish
Recommended for grades 3-5.

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Skill Checklists
Students self-assess and eventually determine how to improve their work by using rubrics describing quality criteria.

Music Self-Assessment

Math Self-Assessment

What Happened? What’s Next?
Generic, grades 3-12.

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ELL Plant Metaphor Self-Assessment
Suitable for young students and English learners in grades K-12.

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Dedicated Improvement and Reflection Time (DIRT)
Appropriate for any content, grades 3-12.

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Peer feedback allows students to give feedback to each other about their work and suggest possible next steps. Peer feedback functions mainly as a collaborative learning activity. Peer feedback gives students practice with recognizing the success criteria for classroom learning goals in work that is not their own, which may give them a clearer understanding of the learning goal.

This benefit to peer reviewers occurs whether or not their suggestions for improvement are taken. Just like formative self-assessment, formative peer feedback does not involve students giving scores or grades to their peers.

Students whose work is reviewed by peers receive feedback that they must consider in light of the criteria and what they were trying to learn, again giving them a clearer understanding of the learning goal. This is a benefit whether they agree with peers’ suggestions for improvement or not. If students agree that peers’ suggestions would improve their work and revise their work accordingly, this collaborative learning activity also helps to improve students’ work.

Resources

Two Stars and a Wish
Students identify two areas in which a particular piece of their peer’s work is strong, and one in need of improvement. In order to work, this tactic has to be followed by an opportunity to revise and improve the work, if the students chooses to do so (feedback is feedback, not a mandate). For more information, click here. For a variety of templates, click here. Recommended for grades 3-5.

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Applying Success Criteria
This is a generic version of “Two Stars and a Wish” to make it more appropriate for use with older students. Students identify two areas in which a particular piece of their peer’s work is strong, and one in need of improvement.

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Ladder of Feedback
This is a protocol that supports students in giving each other constructive feedback for learning. Students start at the bottom, asking questions of clarification about their peer’s work, then commenting on what they value about it, then raising concerns and making suggestions for improvement.

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Single-Point Rubrics
Task-specific visual rubrics use images instead of text to communicate levels of quality in student work. Students can compare a peer’s work to an image and also indicate which features of other images could be emulated. Recommended for English Learners, students with disabilities, and all students grades K-12.

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Visual Rubrics
Task-specific visual rubrics use images instead of text to communicate levels of quality in student work. Students can compare a peer’s work to an image and also indicate which features of other images could be emulated. Recommended for English Learners, students with disabilities, and all students grades K-12.

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Using Exemplars
Exemplars are examples of work on a specific assignment that illustrate what student work looks like along a continuum of quality.

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Feedback breaks are brief exercises that are used at pause points in lessons to allow students to take stock of their learning. They are essentially self-assessment exercises built strategically into moments of the lesson where retrospection would be helpful, for example after one concept has been presented, before moving on to another concept that builds on previous understanding.

Feedback breaks also give students an opportunity to articulate their emerging understandings in words, which helps them process what they are learning. Teachers get information about how students are progressing, and students have an opportunity to consolidate their emerging understandings of new content. A teacher can also strategically use a question at a critical pause point to help determine the direction for the remainder of the lesson. Dylan Wiliam has called these hinge point questions. See Dylan talk about these questions on video here: https://youtu.be/Mh5SZZt207k .

Resources

Blank Slides
Recommended for middle school through college.

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What’s Clear? What’s Unclear?
Recommended for grades K-12

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One Minute Papers
Write down one thing that they learned or that struck them

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Hing Point Questions
How to make multiple-choice, hinge questions work in your classroom and your teaching

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About this Resource/Editors

Editorial Policy

The editors encourage submissions of formative assessment practices for potential inclusion in the FACT collection, using the contribution form accessed from the contribution button on the FACT home page. You do not need to be an NCME member to submit. The editors will review each submission against the Review Criteria listed below. They may consult with members of the NCME Classroom Assessment Task Force or other reviewers. Contributors will be notified about the editorial decision for their submissions: accept, revise, or reject, similar to a journal review process.

Review Criteria for Submissions

The formative assessment practice is:

Easily applied (either a brief description or a download that can be easily incorporated into lesson plans) – “grab and go”
If used as described, likely to yield assessment information that is useful for both teachers and students
Appropriate both developmentally for the grade levels suggested and in terms of learning science
An original design, or open-source, or permissioned and cited

The Editors

Heidi L. Andrade
handrade@albany.edu

Susan M. Brookhart
brookhart@duq.edu

Purpose of the FACT Website

To be a curated resource bank that:

Provides teachers with formative assessment practices that can be plugged into any curriculum and instruction
Is available in easy-to-use form, for free, to anyone
With the ultimate aim of increasing the use of formative assessment in classroom learning