Focus on Formative Assessment and Feedback

Give students an opportunity to demonstrate their learning at the beginning and end of each lesson via this brief reflective activity.

At the beginning of the lesson, have your students fill out an entry ticket. This can be used to check their understanding of the content that has already been covered. Try using the following prompts:

• Identify 3 points you remember from yesterday’s lesson

• The thing that has interested me most about this topic so far is__

• Right now I’m feeling __ about this lesson because I ___

At the end of the lesson, students can follow this up with an exit slip. This should assess their understanding of the lesson content and identify any gaps in understanding that remain. You might use such prompts as:

• What 3 points you are taking away from today’s lesson?

• What are 3 things you are still uncertain about?

• What are you hoping to learn in our next lesson?

Student answers don’t have to take a written form either. Your students might prefer rating themselves on a scale or assigning themselves an emoji such as or ☹ depending on their confidence.

After they’ve all been collected, use the slips to assess student progress – both over the course of the lesson and overall.

Self-assessment reveals a student’s level of understanding and locates the areas that need intervention. Give students a copy of the rubric you ordinarily use for assessment, but this time ask them to fill it out.

Make sure you model the process first if your students have never done this before. Talk through the assessment criteria and highlight the self-questioning and reflective language that can be used for each.

Self-assessment can also take the form of a simple questionnaire or survey for younger students. Just make sure you tie the questions you ask back to the assessment criteria in student-friendly language.

Note: if you discover your rubrics are too complex for students to use for self-assessment, this is a sign they need to change. The most effective rubrics should be transparent enough for teacher and student use.

Besides being private and pressure-free, self-assessment is also a prime means of developing students’ metacognitive abilities. With repeated practice, they’ll be able to instinctively reflect on their learning as a matter of course.

Quizzes are a quick and easy way to assess student progress, and online platforms such as Kahoot and Quizlet can make it an engaging whole class activity.

If you’re going to create your own quiz it’s worth including a scoring system. The inclusion of points incentivizes student effort even if it doesn’t have any impact on an overall grade.

Quizzes can serve as learning opportunities as well as assessments. Try the following strategies:

• Stick to one concept but sequence the questions so they become steadily more challenging. Students will see how simple processes and understandings can be applied to more complex questions.

• Provide meaningful answers. Explain why an answer is correct and how it can be reached.

• Team it with a reflective activity such as an exit slip (above). After a quiz, students will have a clearer idea of their own strengths and weaknesses.

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 work really well. Five minutes per student would take quite a bit of time, but you don’t have to talk to every student about every project or lesson.

You can also shift some of this work to students using a peer-feedback process called TAG feedback (Tell your peer something they did well, Ask a thoughtful question, Give a positive suggestion). When you have students share the feedback they have for a peer, you gain insight into both students’ learning.

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. Or think beyond the visual and have kids act out their understanding of the content. They can create a dance to model cell mitosis or act out stories like Ernest Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants” to explore the subtext.

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: Present students with a common misunderstanding and ask them to apply previous knowledge to correct the mistake, or ask them to decide if a statement contains any mistakes at all, and then discuss their answers.

For Self Assessment/Reflection for knowledge and understanding of content

What did I learn about?

What don't I understand yet?

What questions do I have now?

For Self Assessment/Reflection for skill development

What can I already do?

How can I share my skills to help my peers who may need more practice?

What will I work on next?

For Self Assessment/Reflection for personal learning strategies

What can I do to become a more efficient and effective learner?

How can I become more flexible in my choice of learning strategies?

What factors are important for helping me learn well?