15 Formative Assessment Hacks to Boost Students’ Learning

Formative assessment is one of the most important aspects of instruction—it’s how we celebrate student learning and growth, and how we help uncover learning needs to point students in the right direction. However, time and time again I used to find myself thinking, “I definitely thought that was going to go better” after giving a formative assessment. That feeling inspired me to modify or adapt a variety of strategies to make them even more effective, especially in promoting students’ metacognition, ownership over learning, and self-efficacy.

The assessment strategies below are widely used, so I’m hoping my tweaks will inspire you to continue finding new ways to accurately measure what students have learned.

15 Ways to Improve Your Formative Assessments

1. Exit ticket loops: Exit tickets are a great way to check for understanding at the end of a lesson. However, we can get even more value by reusing them the next day, either at the beginning of class as a bridge to the previous day’s content or at the end by adding a new question so that students see how pieces of information are connected, which can help increase retention.

2. Digital game-based formative assessment reflection: Students love game-based formative assessment tools like Blooket, Gimkit, Quizizz, etc., but I found that the fun often outweighed the learning—those assessments needed a supplement. To solve this, try using a review sheet to help students process their learning at the end of the game. They can still enjoy the game, but the follow-up will help them reflect on the learning needs and successes that the game was intended to uncover.

3. Fist to five and your next question: Fist to five is a check-in where students rate their understanding of a concept from a fist (0) to a 5. This can be a good way for a teacher to get a quick understanding of how students are doing, but often it simply ends there. To take it a step further, when students rate their understanding, have them then identify what they need to learn to move up to the next level (their next question). This helps them identify a personal learning goal and engages them in metacognition—they are really thinking about their thinking.

4. Entry tasks throughout the lesson: An entry task is designed to either connect back to previous content, provide an anticipatory experience for the content to come, or a bit of both. My tweak was to design these tasks so that students could revisit them at the end of class and add new information from the lesson. Maybe there were a couple of questions they couldn’t fully answer at the beginning of the lesson, but by the end they could answer them more fully. This strategy can be a great way to help set a learning intention for students.

5. Gathering oral assessment data: So much data about student learning is revealed in conferences and conversations with students, but that’s hard to keep track of. How can we capture that formative assessment data? I found it helpful to carry an oral assessment tracker during class discussions and to use an individualized slip during informal check-ins. These provided me with assessment data I could use to verify trends, identify areas of need, or determine a student’s current score on a skill or standard.

6. Multiple choice question analysis: To ensure that multiple choice questions are a valuable learning tool, try creating just a couple that have one correct answer and other answers that are plausible if a specific error was made. Then, have students not only identify the correct answer but also explain what error would lead to the incorrect answers. This helps them think critically about the content and processes that go into the correct answer and helps them uncover misconceptions and common errors to be aware of. A variation of this is to have students create the incorrect answers and switch with a partner, who will see if they can identify the error that led to each incorrect answer.

7. Quiz follow-up: I often found that my quizzes didn’t have the learning value I hoped for—they gave me helpful information but didn’t always seem to help students learn more. So I set up a follow-up activity when I returned quizzes to give students curated resources connected to the concepts in the quiz. For example, if a quiz covers mitosis and meiosis, you could create an activity that includes resources for the two topics separately. When students get their results, they analyze which questions they struggled with and what concepts those questions cover, and then spend time with the appropriate learning resources to grow their understanding of that concept.

This helps close the feedback loop—students get instruction on their misconceptions almost immediately, and they get to experience ownership over their learning in a controlled format.

8. Google Forms review: If your quiz is multiple-choice questions in Google Forms, you can provide fast remediation by using the “Go to Section Based on Answer” feature to embed resources that students are taken to if they answer the question incorrectly. For example, if the question is 2(2+2)= and the incorrect answers show a misunderstanding of order of operations, students will next see a review video with another attempt at the question. Using this Google Forms feature allows you to provide remediation and an additional attempt the instant the student misses a question, creating a faster feedback loop for the student.

9. Digital feedback with resources: Feedback is an important part of formative assessment, but so often I found that students didn’t see the value in it. To address this, when leaving feedback on student work digitally, I would provide links to resources the student could access immediately to grow their understanding. Tools like text expanders can be helpful here, and Google Classroom has a comment bank feature that you can use to create comments with detailed explanations and digital resources linked to address common errors. Then, with just a couple of keystrokes, you can insert the entire comment with the resources while leaving feedback.

When I embedded resources into my feedback, students were much more likely to engage with the feedback, and it became less common for me to see errors repeated time and time again.

10. Gate quiz: I’ll admit that I have given students an assessment when they weren’t ready simply because it was the date set for the assessment. The impact of this on students and their learning was often negative. So I began to create quizzes that covered some of the fundamental knowledge that students needed to know to succeed on the assessment—they needed to pass this “gate quiz” in order to proceed to the assessment. It was really helpful if I could set this up as a digital assessment that students could repeat as many times as needed. This helped me identify students who needed additional support and helped students tap into their self-efficacy by identifying background knowledge they already knew and could use as a foundation.

11. Closed- and open-note quiz: Whenever students took a quiz, I was challenged by what to do with the information they didn’t know on the quiz. What I found success with was giving both a closed-note quiz and an open-note one. Students would attempt the quiz without their notes using one color (either digitally with a font color or physically with a colored pen) and then get their notes and/or book out and add to their answers with a new color. The original color gave me an accurate picture of where students were currently in their understanding, and this process allowed students to identify elements they didn’t know and immediately access a resource to find that information.

12. Assessment structure: When giving assessments, I noticed a couple of elements that concerned me: Students who struggled early in the assessment seemed to give up more easily than others, and when the assessment was done and corrected, it was hard for me to tell students what they needed to work on because of the way my questions were mixed together. I began designing my assessments so that the earlier questions connected to background knowledge, and I would group questions together based on the concept or complexity level. This helped students persevere longer because they experienced some success in the early questions, and it made the assessment much more usable for both me and students afterward.

13. Rank and justify question: When I started teaching, many of the questions I designed had one correct answer, which didn’t promote the depth of thinking I was hoping to see. Instead of simply having students choose the correct answer or best example when given options, I started having them rank the options from most correct to least correct or from best to worst, and they had to justify their ranking with an explanation. I found that this approach was also great as a pre-discussion assessment activity.

14. Thumbs up/thumbs down: While “thumbs up if you get it and thumbs down if you don’t” is a helpful way to get a pulse on the room, sometimes it’s tough to support the thumbs-down students in the moment. So, after students identify their level of understanding, have them get into mixed groups—some students with thumbs up and some with thumbs down—and have those with thumbs down question those who had thumbs up. This takes a bit of time, but I found it to have significant benefits for all students, especially those who had questions that, when answered in the moment, really helped increase engagement and learning for the rest of the lesson.

15. Learning memos: The interesting thing about assessments is that when we’re evaluating students, we make inferences about what we think they know based on what we see in the product or assessment. This is tricky in the age of AI, or anytime we aren’t sure the student created the product. One way I would address this was through learning memos—essentially a document that students complete after an assessment or assignment where they would explain how they demonstrated an understanding of the learning objectives. This helped make their thinking explicit for me as I was assessing their work, and it ensured that, even if they didn’t create the product, they still had to engage in thinking about the content and learning outcomes connected to it.

The key with these strategies, as with all of teaching, is to experiment—but don’t experiment blindly. Have a vision of key elements you want in your classroom, and experiment with them in mind. My vision involved students using their own assessment data, reflecting deeply on their learning, and really engaging in both creative and critical thinking about the concept at hand. Not every tweak I tried worked, but every time I tried to improve my methods, no matter how big or small, whether that specific activity worked or not, it moved me closer to the dream classroom that I envisioned.