Formative Assessment Guide

A group of adult learners discussing a topic in a modern classroom.

Introduction

One of the toughest tasks of an instructor might be trying to figure out how the learners are doing on a day-to-day basis. Are they absorbing the information? Is there a need for intervention before the course is done? How do you do that? One of the best ways is through formative assessment. 

This lesson will act as a guide on what formative assessments, how to create them, and how to use them to improve learning outcomes.

Learning Objectives

After completing this training, the learner will be able to:

  • Demonstrate their knowledge of Formative Assessment
  • Describe the five types of Assessment and the differences between them
  • Describe the different types of Formative Assessment
  • Describe how to use Formative Assessments
  • Create a Formative Assessment
  • Effectively use Formative Assessment Feedback

What is a Formative Assessment

A Formative Assessment is any activity that a teacher performs to gain information about student learning. These assessments are considered to be formative because they are intentionally planning, or otherwise forming future instruction (K., J., 2020). Teachers use them to adjust their lessons approach to the student, and students use them to adjust their approach to the lesson.

Typically, Formative Assessments are done through short knowledge checks of some sort that provide instant feedback to both the instructor and the learner about that learner’s current level of comprehension. They can be utilized in many ways, but generally they are low-stakes activities, which make the learner feel less anxious about the possibility of answering the question(s) incorrectly, and target specific skills or content knowledge existing within a narrowly defined scope (Ultimate Guide, 2023).

The Council of State School Officers released a report about Formative Assessments where they described practices that students and teachers much perform to reach peak efficiency with formative assessments (CCSSO, 2023):

  • Clarifying learning goals and success criteria within a broader progression of learning
  • Eliciting and analyzing evidence of student thinking
  • Engaging in self-assessment and peer feedback
  • Providing actionable feedback
  • Using evidence and feedback to move learning forward by adjusting learning strategies, goals, or next instructional steps
A male university student leans over his desk filling out an assessment.

The Variety of Assessment

Instructors must navigate a complicated web of lessons and assessments. It is not an easy task, partly because there are so many types to choose from. How do you know which to use in which situation? The long list of assessments an instructor might choose from include:

  • Formative Assessment: This broad strategy of assessment is a low-stakes tool used to gather information about the student learning at any point during the training. This type of assessment helps a learner understand what they don’t know.
  • Summative Assessment: This narrower strategy is a high-stakes assessment used to identify a learner’s level of knowledge transfer after training is complete. This type of assessment helps a learner understand what they know.
  • Diagnostic Assessment: This strategy can be broads or very narrowly focused and is used to find issues or weaknesses within a system of process. This type of assessment helps a learner understand gaps in knowledge.
  • Benchmarking Assessment: This broad strategy is an assessment which gauges a learner’s performance against a pre-defined standard. This could be a numeric value, a period of time, or some other set point. This type of assessment helps a learner how they compare to other learners.
  • Continual Assessment: This varied strategy of assessment is carried out in an on-going bases (day-by-day, week-by-week, etc.). It allows instructors and learners to observe and record learning as it happens and also is a great way to diagnose gaps in instruction. This type of assessment helps a learner to know how their educational journey is tracking.

The Variety of Formative Assessments

Now that we understand the variety of assessments that are available for instructors to use, lets take a deeper dive into Formative Assessments specifically. The National Council of Teachers of English wrote a report which described the four types of Formative Assessment as well as examples of the different assessments within each type (Fleischer et al., 2013). While not a complete list, the following is a great place to start:

  • Observations: Every teacher’s most powerful tool is their ability to watch their students in a factual and non-judgmental way. This information can then be used to understand current learner ability and aids in planning subsequent lessons appropriately. To capture the observations, note taking is required. This could be a detailed journal, a series of sticky notes, or a checklist. Later, refer back to the notes to help you formulate a plan moving forward for the class and/or individual students. Examples of observational activities include:
    • Open Ended: Ask the students to set up the classroom or lab for the upcoming lesson then take notes on how they behaved. Did they know how to set up the materials? Where they confident or timid?
    •  Semi-Structured: Observe the class and note students that interact during group events and class discussion. Are they answering confidently? Are they answering correctly, partially correctly, or not correct at all?
    • Very Structured: Observe and record, in detail, several specific tasks. You may even find it beneficial to rate or rank the students responses.
  • Conversations: The classroom shouldn’t just be about an instructor feeding information down to the learner. Knowledge transfer happens best when a teacher delivers information, then received feedback from the student, then delivers more information framed around that feedback, and so on. These conversations could be wide-ranging or narrowly focused, based on the needs of the learners. Some examples include:
    •  Surveys: Oral or written surveys help gather information about learners’ progress, preferences, or needs and are ideal for comparing progress over time.
    • Interviews: Large group, small group, or one-on-one interviews are a great way to target specific topics for assessment. Based on the needs of the student body these might be based around open-ended or specifically targeted questions.
    • Conferences: In this setting, teachers invite students to share with the class their thoughts on the topics. You could think of these somewhere between a student delivering a book report and someone giving a TedTalk.
  • Self-Evaluations: This strategy is based around deliberate efforts to elicit the students’ perspective on their level of learning. By encouraging them to monitor and analyze their own learning self-evaluations help make students more self aware and identify their own short falls. Examples of self-evaluations include:
    • Exit Slip or Exit Ticket: Possibly the most common form of formative assessment, these are handed out as class ends for the day and ask students 1 or 2 short questions covering the topic(s) they just learned about. This allows teachers to very quickly gauge if the day’s objectives were achieved.
    • Student-Graded Quiz: These short quizzes help student to identify holes in their knowledge and since they will be grading it themselves, and no score will be placed in the grade-book, the pressure to succeed is relieved.
    • Rubrics: By using these pre-determined lists of lesson requirements, the students can easily track their progress in the class.
    • Process Reflections: Students are asked to write a journal detailing the process they used to create a particular artifact for class or understanding of one or more concepts taught in class. This exercise asks students to deeply explore the lessons and to form an approach to tackling the topics in the future.
A learner holding a pen is prepared to begin writing a journal entry.

How are Formative Assessments Used

We now understand what a formative assessment is and how to create one, which leaves us the obvious next step; learning the appropriate way to use it. Unlike other forms of assessment, formative assessments are used to directly aid in planning future lessons and to help students motivate themselves into achieving their educational goals. The first, and possibly the most difficult part of knowing how to use formative assessments, is figuring out which type will work best for your situation. This short course gave just a few examples, but there are hundreds. Check out this exhaustive lest by Edutopia. To help you make this decision, ask yourself, “What type of skill/content am I trying to measure?.” Refer to this short list to help make your decision (J.K., 2020):

  • Content Knowledge: This is the simplest area to assess as learners are tasked with defining, identifying, and differentiating between the learning objectives. Basically, the assessments are meant to help us understand if the learner has memorized the information or not. Self-Evaluations like Exit-Slips or Student-Graded Quizzes offer the simplest way to  achieve this goal.
  • Process Oriented: This is a more difficult area to asses as learners are tasked with scripting, outlining, and listing the steps in a process. Peer reviews and observational assessments work best here.
  • Higher-Order Thinking Skills: This is likely the most difficult and time-consuming area to assess as learners are tasked with analyzing, synthesizing, and elaborating on the learning objectives. Because learners may not know what they don’t know, self-assessments will be less accurate here. Instead, using a conversation or other peer-based assessments. 

The course has been written and the first few sections of lesson 1 have been delivered. Now it’s time to see if any of that knowledge transfer worked. You chose the perfect formative assessment, wrote it, delivered it to your students, and now you have some data. But, what does it mean? What can you do with it? Since formative assessments are used to improve future instruction we know that a close review of the data can help guide us. As a general rule of thumb, the results of a formative assessment indicate the following:

  • 50% or Less of the Class Demonstrate Mastery of the Material: The instruction was not effectively received by the class. Reteaching of the entire needs to be done. For more information on reteaching see The Comprehensive Guide to Re-teaching.
  • 50% to 80% of the Class Demonstrate Mastery of the Material: The instruction was received by the class, but there’s room for improvement. You will need to offer different activities moving forward. The students who did show mastery of the material may have an opportunity for advanced learning.
  • 80% or More of the Class Demonstrate Mastery of the Material: The instruction was effectively received by the class, and you can plan on moving forward without much of an adjustment to your original course design. The few students who failed to show master of the material will need extra attention.

The best way to approach formative assessment isn’t so much a it being a thing you give to learners. Instead, the classroom should be a formative learning environment. That is, make it a safe place for students where you, as the teacher provides instruction, asks for feedback, gauges learner progression, then tailors the next lesson accordingly. Keep in mind that formative classrooms all share these values: 

  • Assessments are done with the learner, not given to the learner.
  • Activities should be focused on the process, not outcomes.
  • Students are focused on improving problem-solving skills and self-regulation and not simply exam performance.
  • Knowledge and conceptual gain define learner success rather than test results.
A student sits in an empty auditorium filling out papers.

How to Write Formative Assessment Questions

Your teaching values and pedagogy are your own, so the formative assessments you create will differ from other instructors, classes, institutions, and situations. Because of that, this lesson can not give you a step by step on how to write the perfect formative assessment. What it can do it provide you with some helpful guiderails which you can use to get started, and stay on your learning objectives. The following list (Chandler-Grevatt, 2020) will guide you based on what type of formative questions you need to write.

  • Closed Questions: Close questions are most often associated with summative assessments because the assessment is looking for one specific answer which can be quantified and scored. For example, in a graphic design course you might see the following question as part of the summative assessment: 

These are compiled of pixels, or tiny dots, each containing a unique hue and tonal information that, when viewed all together at a distance, form a complete picture. 

  1. Vector Image
  2. Symmetrical image
  3. Raster Image

Of course the answer is 3. Raster Image. It’s an absolute answer.  However, in the context of a formative assessment you aren’t looking for an absolute answer from a test. Think of it more of a knowledge resource. Instead of a single answer, write a question that begins a conversation. Using the same context as before, here’s an example of a formative question:

Describe the difference between a Raster Image and a Vector Image.

This new version of the assessment question has a finite set of answers but it is written in a way that encourages the learner to think about the answer, discuss the answer, and share their existing knowledge of the topic.

  • Open-Ended Questions: Open-ended questions are written to purposefully invite extended, thoughtful, and detailed answers from the learner. It encourages the learner to identify what they know, and don’t know, about a topic. Plus, it helps them learn what they need to do to improve. If we repurpose our previous questions we might end up with an open-ended questions like this:

What is the process used to decide between using a Raster Image or a Vector Image in a layout. Explain how that choice might affect the output to three different publication types.

This open-ended questions encourages the learner to speak in detail about not just what the item is, but how they make the decision to use on or the other in their work. Notice how the question contains a follow up question which asks the learner to give supporting guidance. You could also a rubric to elicit more thought about the topic.

  • Diagnostic Questions: Formative diagnostic questions are often written with a choice of answers available to the learner. Depending on the answer chosen, the instructor can make decisions on the need for and plan to begin intervention. There are several forms of questions that work well for diagnosing gaps in knowledge. It could be multiple choice, concept images, pinch point choice, or others. When you use diagnostic questions, begin by writing an introduction that explains to the learner what you are doing and why. An example of a diagnostic question introduction might be something like:

The following activity is designed to help you discover what you currently know about page layout basics and areas within the topic where you have more work to do to fully understand it. After the activity, based on your results, you can decide which improvement activity you need. At the end of the lesson, you should be able to explain your initial knowledge deficit, what you learned about the topic and why that information is important. 

This approach to diagnostic questions gives ownership of the act of learning to the student. It motivates them to better understand what they learned and why.

References

Chandler-Grevatt, A. (2020, August 11). How to write questions for formative assessment. Education in Chemistry. Retrieved February 11, 2023, from https://edu.rsc.org/feature/how-to-write-questions-for-formative-assessment/4012260.article

Council of Chief State School Officers. (2023, February 13). Revising the Definition of Formative Assessment. CCSSO. Retrieved February 13, 2023, from https://ccsso.org/resource-library/revising-definition-formative-assessment

Fleischer, C., Filkins, S., Garcia, A., Mitchell-Pierce, K., Scherff, L., Sibberson, F., & Davis, M. (2013, October 21). Formative assessment that truly informs instruction. Urbana, IL; National Council of Teachers of English. Retrieved February 11, 2023 from https://www.commonsense.org/sites/default/files/pdf/2016-08/formative-assessment-informing-instruction.pdf

K., J. (2020, June 25). Teachers’ essential guide to formative assessment. Common Sense Education. Retrieved February 11, 2023, from https://www.commonsense.org/education/articles/teachers-essential-guide-to-formative-assessment

The Ultimate Guide to Formative Assessments | Guides. (2023, January 03). Otus. Retrieved February 11, 2023, from https://otus.com/guides/formative-assessments