Assessment allows both instructor and student to monitor progress towards achieving learning objectives, and can be approached in a variety of ways. Formative assessment refers to tools that identify misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps along the way and assess how to close those gaps. It includes effective tools for helping to shape learning, and can even bolster students’ abilities to take ownership of their learning when they understand that the goal is to improve learning, not apply final marks (Trumbull and Lash, 2013). It can include students assessing themselves, peers, or even the instructor, through writing, quizzes, conversation, and more. In short, formative assessment occurs throughout a class or course, and seeks to improve student achievement of learning objectives through approaches that can support specific student needs (Theal and Franklin, 2010, p. 151). 

Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) are generally simple, non-graded, anonymous, in-class activities designed to give you and your students useful feedback on the teaching-learning process as it is happening.

Examples of CATs include the following.

• The Background Knowledge Probe is a short, simple questionnaire given to students at the start of a course, or before the introduction of a new unit, lesson or topic. It is designed to uncover students’ pre-conceptions.
• The Minute Paper tests how students are gaining knowledge, or not. The instructor ends class by asking students to write a brief response to the following questions: “What was the most important thing you learned during this class?” and “What important question remains unanswered?”
• The Muddiest Point is one of the simplest CATs to help assess where students are having difficulties. The technique consists of asking students to jot down a quick response to one question: “What was the muddiest point in [the lecture, discussion, homework assignment, film, etc.]?” The term “muddiest” means “most unclear” or “most confusing.”

Formative assessment is at the forefront of many education conversations and, at present, many accept intuitively that it’s an important part of the learning process.

Yet, how do we know formative assessment actually works? In this blog, we unpack some of the research base underlying the practice of formative assessment.

For those less familiar with the practice, it is important to note that formative assessment is a process in which students and teachers work together to improve learning. Both students and teachers are active participants in the process as they generate, interpret, and use evidence of learning to 1) aim for learning goals, 2) apply criteria to the work they produce, and 3) decide on next steps.

To summarize the process, there is a formative learning cycle which encourages students to repeatedly ask these three questions:

• Where am I going?
• Where am I now?
• Where to next?

Further, formative assessment is not a particular kind of test, or marks or grades, but rather an ongoing practice.