Formative Assessment

Learning starts with good instruction and good instruction is rooted in knowing and understanding where students are in the learning process. Formative assessments provide the information necessary to design good instruction that targets each individual student.

The following excerpt from the Carnegie Mellon website defines and explains formative assessments.

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. Examples of formative assessments include asking students to:

• draw a concept map in class to represent their understanding of a topic

• submit one or two sentences identifying the main point of a lecture

• turn in a research proposal for early feedback

Nice list of 50 formative assessment tools  (be sure to verify that the assessment tool you select is on the approved apps list and has been approved for use in MPS)