How to Decide What to Do After Your Formative Assessment

In the 1900s, many educators believed that if you built a solid lesson and taught it efficiently, learning followed: One and done, no need for reteaching. But in 1998, a seminal paper by Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam showed that formative assessment leads to “substantial learning gains” and should be a central aspect of classroom practice. By the early 2000s, lessons increasingly integrated formative assessment as a core practice. Today, a “significant body of evidence” connects formative assessment with student achievement.

But that research only holds when teachers analyze patterns in student work and adjust instruction accordingly. New teachers—and some experienced ones—may struggle with that second half of formative assessment: deciding what to do next.

4 Places to Look Before You Reteach

When your formative assessment uncovers a learning breakdown, the “why” is commonly one of four fixable problems: Students were unclear about what success looked like, used the wrong approach, were confused by the directions, or couldn’t perform the task in a new context. These problems are based on a synthesis of research on goals, access and cognitive load, strategy use, and transfer.

While the categories don’t capture every possible learning issue (“Squirrel!”), they represent the patterns that teachers encounter frequently, and they respond well to instructional adjustments.

1. Goal confusion: The learning target or success criteria are unclear to students.

Early in my teaching, I assumed that learning goals would be obvious to students, but experience quickly showed that without explicit goals, learners could complete a task yet miss the kind of thinking the task was designed to reveal.

Example: When asked to solve a math problem and show their thinking, several students show the correct steps and final answer but offer no explanation. Their work aims at procedural accuracy rather than the required mathematical reasoning.

What to do next: Teachers can use one or more of the following approaches, depending on instructional time available.

• Reteach the target, not the topic.
• Say what students did and why it missed the mark. “Most of us showed the steps correctly, but this question asks for reasoning, not just the procedure.”
• Describe the success criteria in student-friendly language.
• Share a strong model and annotate what makes it work.
• Create a short, scaffolded rehearsal, such as a “Because the math rule here is…” sentence.

2. Process disconnect: Students’ strategies or understandings don’t yet fit the task.

In this category, students apply what worked before, even though a new task requires a different approach.

Example: The class is asked to explain what happens when ice is placed in sunlight. Some students draw the ice and state that it “melts” without describing heat transfer or energy movement. Students apply a labeling process when the task requires an explanatory process.

Process disconnect and goal confusion often look similar. Both manifest as off-target or incomplete work. In goal confusion, students aim at the wrong target. Process disconnect is about using the wrong approach. The distinction is important because goal confusion calls for clarifying the learning target, while process disconnect calls for reteaching or adjusting the strategy.

To identify whether students are making a processing error or a goal error, ask them, “What were you trying to do here?” Students with goal confusion will describe an incorrect learning target. Students with a process disconnect will correctly name the aim but explain a strategy that doesn’t meet the task’s demand.

What to do next: In general, the instructional response to a process disconnect is to interrupt the old strategy, model the new one, and ask students to retry. More specifically:

• Identify the strategy that students are using. Ask one or two students to show or describe how they approached the task. Then name the issue: “Most of us are describing what happened instead of explaining why it happened.”
• Describe why the strategy doesn’t work. “Describing the outcome tells me what happened. This question asks what caused it.”
• Use the original prompt to demonstrate the correct strategy, slowing down to emphasize what you are doing differently.
• Give students a narrow sentence frame to apply the new strategy immediately. “Complete this sentence: The ice melted because…” The sentence frame lowers the cognitive load so that students practice the process just modeled, on the specific task that caused trouble.

3. Access issue: The task design, directions, or language used limit entry to the task.

This category applies to prompts, word problems, lab directions, document-based questions, and rubrics in every discipline. The barrier is not the concept but the language, structure, or format of the task itself.

Example: Students are asked to analyze a complex primary source excerpt. They underline some words, but that’s all. Although the task requires interpreting the author’s perspective, the density of language blocks students before they can engage with the historical thinking.

Incomplete work, hesitation, or off-task behavior can indicate that access is the main issue, which can resemble goal confusion. The difference is that students with access issues are blocked before they can meaningfully engage with the task.

What to do next:

• In plain language, describe and write out what students are being asked to do—first, next, and last steps.
• Reduce the language load by shortening sentences, simplifying vocabulary, removing nonessential context, or highlighting key information.
• Provide a worked example.
• Narrow the task. For the complex primary source example above, you could ask students to interpret just one paragraph that is central to the author’s perspective, and then analyze the full text once access has been established.

4. Transfer breakdown: Students are not yet able to apply learning in a new context.

Transfer problems occur when students can use a skill during practice or with support but cannot recognize when to use the same skill in a new situation. Students wait for the familiar signal words or format that tells them which strategy to use, and when those cues change, the strategy disappears.

Example: Students correctly solve multiplication problems using arrays during practice, but they struggle when asked to independently apply the same reasoning to a word problem involving equal groups. The strategy works in the familiar format but does not carry over when the context changes.

Transfer breakdown is easy to misidentify as an access issue, since both tend to appear as hesitation, questions, and incomplete work. To distinguish the two, remember that access issues keep students from entering the task; transfer breakdowns occur when students don’t recognize that they’ve already learned a strategy that fits the work.

What to do next: When transfer breaks down, build bridges between contexts.

• Help students recognize that the task shares the same underlying structure as work they’ve already learned. “Where have we seen this structure before?” You may have to say explicitly what hasn’t changed: “This is still about equal groups.”
• Require a strategy label before execution. Have students say or write, “This is a _____ kind of problem, so I need to _____.”
• Run one problem that looks almost the same as the previous formative assessment, then one that looks a little different, and so on until you get head nods. Tiny steps support big transfer.
• Make the connection explicit by naming what stays the same across contexts.

After one of the four learning breakdowns is addressed, quickly recheck for understanding to confirm that the adjustment worked. If the intervention didn’t take, look at a couple of student samples to pinpoint whether the problem is the goal, access to the task, strategy fit, or transfer. Make a targeted change and offer a parallel problem to confirm progress. If the pattern still isn’t obvious during the second intervention, ask students where they got stuck and wait until after class to study the samples and plan the next day’s class.

Think of formative assessment as an ongoing loop: collect evidence, adjust, recheck, and repeat.

What if several students are struggling, but in different ways? That’s common. Address the area affecting the most learners first. Then use targeted support for the remaining gaps through quick independent follow-ups or guided group work. In practice, this saves time: Ten minutes of targeted instruction beats a full period of general reteaching.

Enhance Students’ Monitoring Skills

Teach students to independently detect and repair issues when they are unsure or stuck. The following monitoring prompts strengthen each of the four gaps. You can have the students do the following:

• Circle the part of their work that addresses the goal. “What counts most in this task?”
• Restate, in their own words, what the task is asking them to do before they begin. “What are the steps?”
• Name the strategy they’re using before or during the task. “Does this strategy match the task?”
• Say to a neighbor, “I can use ______ here because the situation still involves ______.” “Does the answer make sense in this situation?”

When monitoring is taught deliberately and effectively, instructional fixes shift from something teachers point out to something students carry out on their own.

Don’t do what I used to do when formative assessment revealed gaps: assume that confusion meant I needed to explain the task again, just more slowly. Confusion is information. It generates actionable data to recalibrate instruction with sharper alignment between evidence and response. When you adopt that mindset, confusion becomes a guide for what comes next.