7 Smart, Fast Ways to Do Formative Assessment

Within these methods you’ll find close to 40 tools and tricks for finding out what your students know while they’re still learning.

edutopia.org/article/7-smart-fast-ways-do-formative-assessment

Entry and exit slips

Exit slips can take lots of forms beyond the old-school pencil and scrap paper. Whether you’re assessing at the bottom of Bloom’s taxonomy or the top, you can use tools like Padlet or Poll Everywhere, or measure progress toward attainment or retention of essential content or standards with tools like Google Classroom’s Question tool, Google Forms with Flubaroo, and Edulastic,

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

Dipsticks: So-called alternative formative assessments are meant to be as easy and quick as checking the oil in your car, so they’re sometimes referred to as dipsticks. These can be things like asking students to:

• write a letter explaining a key idea to a friend,
• draw a sketch to visually represent new knowledge, or
• do a think, pair, share exercise with a partner.

Interview assessments: If you want to dig a little deeper into students’ understanding of content, try discussion-based assessment methods. Casual chats with students in the classroom can help them feel at ease even as you get a sense of what they know, and you may find that five-minute interview assessments

TAG feedback 

Flipgrid, Explain Everything, or Seesaw

Methods that incorporate art: Consider using visual art or photography or videography as an assessment tool. Whether students draw, create a collage, or sculpt, you may find that the assessment helps them synthesize their learning.

Misconceptions and errors: Sometimes it’s helpful to see if students understand why something is incorrect or why a concept is hard. Ask students to explain the “muddiest point” in the lesson—the place where things got confusing or particularly difficult or where they still lack clarity. Or do a misconception check:

Self-assessment: Don’t forget to consult the experts—the kids. Often you can give your rubric to your student