Formative Assessments

Formative assessments are used to monitor student learning. They can be as simple as a verbal question asked during class, practice problems, or polling questions. The purpose of formative assessment is to provide ongoing feedback for the instructor to improve their teaching and for students to improve their learning. 

Formative assessment are low-stakes opportunities, meaning they have little or no point value and may also come in the form of: 

• Practice quizzes
• Brief reflections
• ”Muddiest point”
• Proposal or outline

For the ”Muddiest point” activity, students will write from one to three things that they found difficulty to understand from the textbook reading, lecture, or activity. The instructor can use these points to summarize or re-explain issues that the majority of the class maybe be having difficulty understanding.

Teaching Format Modifications

Based on your teaching format, you may want to modify how you implement formative assessments into your course. Below are suggestions on how you can do that:

Virtual

Use the Zoom polling tool to get a sense of student understanding for the topic being covered. To save some time during class, create polls before class. Use the results page and share with students to continue the discussion, clarify misconceptions, or split the class up for smaller group discussions. Polls can then be reused to see if the class understands the material more accurately.

Connect

Have students submit reflections via Canvas. If using iClicker for polling, be sure to use the iClicker Cloud version so that students at other locations can participate. You could also have students log in via Zoom (without audio) to participate in a poll.