Formative assessment

Formative assessment is an integral part of student-centred teaching and learning. It promotes learning and provides opportunities for formative feedback.

What is it?

Formative assessment is both a learning activity and an assessment approach. It supports student motivation and independent learning by providing students with timely formative feedback. While formative assessment can take many forms, ranging from impromptu practice quizzes to graded reflective journal entries, its developmental role stems from focusing students’ attention on what they are learning and why. Formative assessment can be combined with peer review and/or self-assessment to provide timely formative feedback.

Why is it useful?

Benefits for students

  • Supports students’ motivation and autonomy by highlighting what they are learning and why
  • Builds independent learning skills through forward-oriented feedback
  • Promotes student mental wellbeing by offering an opportunity to practise their knowledge and skills, and receive timely formative feedback in a no-stakes or low-stakes context.

Benefits for educators

  • Provides you with timely information on learning gaps and gives you a chance to respond with appropriate learning activities.

How do I implement it?

To implement formative assessment in your teaching, try these strategies:

  • Integrate formative assessment into your curriculum and your overall assessment strategy. For this, consider what skills formative assessment needs to develop and at what stage of the learning process students require direction in a form of formative feedback. For example, if a summative assessment asks students to apply key concepts learned in the subject in their own analysis, use a quiz to assess their knowledge of these concepts and correct any misunderstandings. The quiz can be set up to provide automated feedback to ease the time pressure on you.
  • Use nested assessment design to give students an opportunity to test their understanding of the task and give feedback on their ideas. For example, if students need to create an artefact for their final assessment, ask them to write a proposal or draw up a design first. Set up a feedback mechanism to ensure that formative assessment serves its purpose. This means providing students with timely feedback that is both targeted and actionable for future tasks. Use assessment rubrics along with exemplars to facilitate effective self-assessment and peer review.
  • Focus on future impact in your feedback by providing sufficient detail and direction. To encourage independent learning and students’ agency, provide clear and affirming feedback and convey interest in your students’ progress. If your formative assessment is graded, assign only small weighting to ensure low-stakes environment and assess students on their effort instead of mastery. Write the assessment rubric [link to resource] to reflect the focus on the effort. The rubric ratings can focus on partial and full completion of different elements of the task.

Supporting technologies

  • LMS Quizzes can be used for both informal and formal low-stakes assessment tasks with options for multiple-choice, true/false and fill-in-the-blanks questions. Students’ responses can be automatically graded to provide students with timely feedback.
  • Poll Everywhere can facilitate both synchronous and asynchronous environments for an impromptu formative assessment to check students’ understanding of key ideas. Be sure to follow this up with a generic feedback session on their poll responses by noting what was correct/done well and how students’ existing understandings could be expanded.
  • LMS Discussions can offer students an asynchronous place to interact about key ideas and learn from each other in a structured way. To facilitate formative assessment through LMS Discussions, give students a clear discussion prompt, model responses and interactions, and summarise students’ contributions correcting misunderstandings and offering ways to expand their thinking.
  • Perusall and FeedbackFruits can be used for social annotation where students collaborate to annotate text, video, or audio resources. Interactive and collaborative work allows students to learn from their peers, correct each other’s mistakes and grow their understanding on a relevant topic.
  • H5P allows you to easily create and embed interactive content in the LMS pages. It offers many interactive tools to facilitate ungraded formative assessment, including interactive video, drag and drop, image pairing, arithmetic quiz, and fill-in-the-blanks activities. For example, the interactive video tool allows you to embed test questions in a video so that students can immediately check their understanding of the video content.

Resources

This page was last updated on 17 Oct 2022.

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