Even the most experienced teachers are faced with the fact that students do not fully understand the material of the lesson. For this reason, various tests or even exams may be failed. To avoid this problem, the teacher should know the basic principles of formative assessment to establish how well students understood the topic. Using this technique, you can focus on those details of the educational material that turned out to be too complicated.

Innovative Formative Assessment Approaches 

• Analyze students’ independent work 

Be sure to assign homework to your students and check it. Try to come up with tasks that will force them to use critical thinking and express their thoughts. Thus, the teacher will be able to check how much the student can memorize and apply the material. It doesn’t have to be limited to homework. You can, for example, hold small quizzes at the end of the lesson.

• 1 question — 3 answers 

Prepare a list of questions on the topic covered. Have students write 3 responses to each question. In this case, the first should be up to 15 words long, the second up to 50, and the third up to 100 words. With this exercise, we not only test how clear the topic was but also the ability to express our thoughts briefly and more fully.

• Conduct discussions 

If you are running a group session, ask your students to pair up. Then ask them a question about the topic of the lecture and invite them to write down the answer. The next task for students is to share their answers with each other and discuss them. If one of the participants in the discussion has problems with reasoning, perhaps, they did not understand the lesson material enough. Help them fix it.

• Conduct an unusual survey 

Ask students to openly answer a few questions: 

• Three things they didn’t know about before; 
• Two things that surprised them; 
• One situation where they can apply the acquired knowledge. 

Analyze the answers and draw conclusions.

• Cards to test knowledge 

Invite students to create cards with questions about the topic covered. At the beginning of the next lesson, have an exchange of cards and ask everyone to give a detailed answer. If someone decided to cheat and wrote a too simple question on the card, ask the author your question.

• Original projects

Students can do simple creative projects in groups or individually. Ideally, such assignments should demonstrate the ability to put into practice the information received in the lesson. But don’t make the task too difficult.

You can also come up with your own ideas for formative assessment. Please note that with the help of such techniques, we must not only check the assimilation of the lesson material but also keep the motivation for learning. Therefore, your assignments should by no means be boring. The best way is for students to learn how to put theory into practice while completing the tasks for formative assessment.