Part of the educational process is assessing students’ progress to find out whether teachers’ objectives and expectations have been met. When it comes to figuring out how our students are learning, formative assessment can be an effective tool for such information gathering. So, it can support us in adapting our teaching and meeting our students’ learning needs.

But, to make this assessment a positive learning experience for our students, we need to understand how it should be approached and implemented in practice.

This post describes formative assessment and addresses some teachers’ questions about its effective implementation.

How to do formative assessment more effectively?

When it comes to practice, integrating properly such an assessment approach is the core concern of many teachers. Here are some key questions that I noted teachers often address (in conferences and training workshops) about formative assessment along with suggested answers.

1) Does it have to be planned by teachers?

There are two types of formative assessment: planned and incidental. The former requires planning as it involves direct testing of students and measuring their current state of knowledge or abilities during a course of study.

For instance: using weekly quizzes and completing exit tickets.

Whereas the latter ‘incidental’ occurs during the instructional conversations between teachers and students in a given classroom activity.

Indeed, interacting with your students and observing them can be a formative assessment tool. Because these can help you collect evidence of their learning and support them to learn from your feedback.

Therefore, try to reduce your talking time and give more opportunities for your students to interact. This is through posing questions, answering, discussing, peer-correcting, sharing new learning, and voicing their ideas. These can tell a lot about how they are learning in your class.

2) Is it about assessing frequently students and using the results to plan the next steps in instruction?

Formative assessment is not only about assessing continuously students. But, it also involves engaging them actively in assessing themselves and others and working out their teachers’ and peer feedback. So, both teachers and students are active in this process.

3) Due to time constraints can this assessment approach be incorporated after a phase of teaching?

This type of assessment is an integrated part of the teaching and learning process, rather than a separate activity occurring after a phase of teaching. So, it needs to be incorporated into your daily teaching activities to capture students’ needs and provide them with useful and timely feedback to act upon to improve their learning.

4) Can teachers rely on one formative assessment procedure to gain insight into how their students are learning?

Your role within this approach is assessing different learning outcomes and tracking students’ progress towards their achievement.

To this end, it’s necessary to integrate more than one kind of formative assessment technique to identify students’ needs. But, you need to keep it simple. Focus on getting an idea about their progress. You can use checklists to track this instead of grading their work.

5) Does it involve grading?

You can provide grades to assess students’ work. Yet, be sure to add your descriptive comments that help students troubleshoot their own performance and take action to improve.

Remember that, unlike summative assessment, formative assessment focuses on the learning process rather than the outcome. So, its feedback needs to be more descriptive rather than evaluative.

You can give grades and descriptive comments, provide only comments or invite your students to guess the score or grades out of those comments.

6) To improve and accelerate students’ learning, what kind of feedback practice should teachers communicate?

Good quality feedback needs to communicate explicitly to students the goals, criteria and expected standards of a given task. It should also clarify the processing of the task (how students need to do it) and self-regulation (how to monitor and control their learning).

Besides, it needs to be directive, telling the student what needs to be fixed or revised. And facilitative, providing comments and suggestions to help guide them in their own revision.

It is, therefore, crucial to make your formative feedback clear, concise, and timely. This will help them to understand and internalize it before using it productively.

In the same concern, to help your students work out your formative feedback create opportunities for them to discuss that feedback (individually or in groups). They’ll get an immediate response about their difficulties, develop their understanding and expectations to standards and decide what to do to close the learning gap.

Being assessed is ‘undoubtedly an emotional business’. So, your feedback needs to have a positive effect on students’ motivational beliefs and self-esteem.

This does not entail describing the work as good when it is not. It is rather describing how the strengths of a student’s work match the criteria for good work. And how those strengths show what the student is learning.

It also involves pointing out where improvement is needed and suggesting what could be done about it.

So, when providing your feedback focus on the process of learning including efforts and strategic behaviours instead of being concerned with the person’s ability or intelligence.

7) How to make explicit assessment criteria and standards for students?

You can provide students with exemplars of performance with attached feedback. This has proved to be a powerful approach since it involves students in comparing their performance with the task standards and goals.

In addition, discuss those criteria and standards in class. Involve students in assessment exercises where they mark or comment on other student’s work in relation to those criteria and standards.

Workshops can also help where students in collaboration with you devise their own assessment criteria for a piece of work.

8) How can teachers help their students make effective use of feedback?

Providing positive feedback is necessary in formative assessment. Yet, this may not suffice to help your students improve. You need to support them to make effective use of it ‘feed-forward’.

To do so:

• Give feedback on work in progress and involve your students in planning strategies for improvement.
• Send your feedback via email so that students can read it again as well as file it.
• Give them time to absorb and act upon or consolidate the feedback comments.
• Provide them with the chance to revise their work, re-do it and resubmit it. This allows them to work out the meaning of your feedback and learn from their mistakes.
• Give them reflective worksheets on your feedback. Then, ask them about their own interpretation of and opinions about that feedback, how they need to improve their performance.
• Support them with a checklist that relates to the task at hand. So, they can revise their work before their submission.
• Discuss their work in groups before submitting them and provide oral feedback.

9) How can teachers know if their students are learning from their feedback?

When students make some kind of response to produce improved work, this proves that they are learning from your feedback. For instance, re-doing the same assignment, practising similar tasks, doing better in future assignments, and getting more motivated in learning.

Evaluating your feedback is also important to find out whether it contributes to students’ learning, improvement, and motivation. And if it makes the classroom a place where even constructive criticism, is valued and viewed as productive.

So, use observation and questionnaires addressed to students to elicit such data.

Formative assessment can be a powerful learning source for your students. I hope this post will help you attain its potential. You CAN do it!