4 Formative Assessment Practices that Make a Difference in Classrooms
Research shows that keeping four practices at the core of instruction makes a big difference. This article discusses clarifying learning, eliciting evidence, providing feedback, and activating learners. It includes formative assessment strategies and techniques with implementation tools and tips
Publication Date: March 2016
Publisher: Northwest Evaluation Association
5 Formative Assessments You'll Love to Use for Large Groups
If you're feeling stuck in assessing your students, these 5 formative assessments are what you need. Educator-in-Residence Sherry Hatton shares creative activities you can use with large groups that will help you quickly assess their knowledge without resorting to a paper and pencil test, rubric, or checklist.
Author: Sherry Hatton
Publication Date: September 2021
Publisher: Institute for Arts Integration and STEAM
27 Easy Formative Assessment Strategies for Gathering Evidence of Student Learning
This article provides formative assessment strategies that are simple to administer. They will provide the evidence of student learning teachers need to make lesson plan adjustments and keep learning on target and moving forward. They will also give students valuable information so they can adjust their learning tactics and know where to focus their energies.
Author: Kathy Dyer
Publication Date: May 2024
Publisher: NWEA
Active Learning Activities
Many students feel more comfortable learning in small groups. This guide provides several activities that can be used in any classroom to engage students. Many of the activities can also serve as formative assessments, a way to monitor student learning/understanding.
Publisher: Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, Northern Illinois University
Amplifying Student Agency and Learning Through Formative Assessment
This recorded webinar explores how the formative assessment process promotes a shared responsibility of teachers and students for using evidence of learning as it develops during daily lessons. Teaching students these skills has significant benefits, including greater student participation, increased attendance, increased motivation, and improved achievement.
Authors: Cali Kaminsky and Yesenia Ayala
Publication Date: July 2025
Publisher: WestEd
An Integrated Approach to Defining a System-Level Theory of Action for Formative Assessment
This is a discussion of an ecological theory of action for formative assessment within the system for planning interventions and policies that support increased and improved teacher practice and student learning. It includes a discussion of the program evaluation theory of action that can be utilized after programs are in place to ensure that the system is working as intended.
Publication Date: June 2018
Publisher: Council of Chief State School Officers
Communicating Learning Goals and Success Criteria with Students
This brief explains including students as part of the Learning Goals and Success Criteria assessment process through understanding the indicators and using them to monitor their own learning.
Author: Nancy Gerzon
Publication Date: October 2020
Publisher: WestEd
Create Formative Assessments with an AI Chatbot
This webpage provides instruction to cut and paste a prompt to create formative assessments for your classroom. Simply replace each bracket with the information for each prompt. It offers an assessment idea prompt, an example prompt, and additional prompting strategies.
Publisher: AI for Education
Draw, Choose, Write or Say: Fantastic Formative Assessments
Formative assessments let teachers make quick changes to their plans to meet students where they are. Don’t think of formative assessment as worksheets and quizzes. This blog entry offers 20 formative assessment methods for students to draw, choose, write, or say to show what they know.
Author: Matt Miller
Publication Date: March 2022
Publisher: Ditch That Textbook
Formative Assessment
The formative assessment process can help teachers determine the status of student learning, giving them the ability to adjust their teaching in the moment and to move all learners forward. This webpage provides information, a framework, and resources to effectively implement the formative assessment process.
Publisher: Arizona Department of Education
Formative Assessment and Feedback Techniques that Engage, Inform and Encourage
In this webinar, participants will be engaged in exploring everyday use of 5 classroom-based formative assessment techniques, with attention to applying the techniques and cultivating access for all students to demonstrate their mathematical understandings.
Authors: Francis Fennell, Beth McCord Kobett, and Jonathan Wray
Publication Date: November 2023
Publisher: Corwin
Formative Assessment and Self-Regulated Learning (REL West)
In this webinar, presenters discuss a recent REL West study that analyzed survey results for more than 1,200 teachers and 24,000 students in three Arizona school districts, including the underlying theory of action and examples of how one participating district has worked to promote key practices highlighted in the study.
Authors: Pam Betten, Lenay Dunn, Margaret Heritage, Reino Makkonen, and Marie Mancuso
Publication Date: January 2021
Publisher: Institute of Education Sciences
Formative Assessment Practices in Sunnyside Unified School District
This report describes the implementation of formative practices in an Arizona district, which can be used by other districts as they examine their own formative assessment practices. The report introduces the research questions, describes the data collected, presents key findings, and concludes with a summary, reflection questions, and a discussion to guide reflection on the results and the overall project.
Authors: Barbara Jones and Lorna Porter
Publication Date: January 2023
Publisher: WestEd
Formative Assessment the Student Role
This document provides information specific to the active role of students in the formative assessment process. A table displays the teacher role and the corresponding student role for each of the 10 dimensions of formative assessment.
Publication Date: January 2018
Publisher: WestEd
Fun Formative Assessment: 12 Easy, No-Tech Ideas You Can Use Tomorrow
Get good, authentic, informative data from assessments that students know aren’t going to be graded
with fun and engaging assessments. This blog entry offers a list of fun formative assessment ideas that can be used with any lesson. These ideas are meant to be used in a grab-bag sort of way so that the teacher nor the students know what they are going to get.
Author: Matt Miller
Publication Date: March 2022
Publisher: Ditch That Textbook
Planning to Support Student Agency through Formative Assessment: Understanding Key Instructional Routines
Students gain agency when they develop an understanding of new content in conjunction with awareness of their learning status. Formative assessment provides students with an inquiry and decision-making framework that they apply to their own, and their peers’ learning. To support students in developing agency, teachers utilize a series of instructional routines outlined in this document.
Publication Date: April 2023
Publisher: Formative Insights Assessment for Learning, WestEd
Revolutionize Formative Assessments with AI-Powered Tools
With the advent of Artificial Intelligence (AI), educators now have access to a wide array of tools that can transform the way they create and use formative assessments in the classroom. This post offers some AI-powered tools that help teachers develop effective formative assessments.
Author: Diana Benner
Publication Date: January 2024
Publisher: TCEA TechNotes
Stop Grading Essays, Start Grading Chats: Reimagining Assessment
This recorded webinar explores innovative approaches to assessment in the era of generative AI, featuring an educator’s experiences and insights from a year of experimenting with grading AI chats in his ninth-grade English classroom.
Authors: Amanda Bickerstaff and Mike Kentz
Publication Date: September 2024
Publisher: AI for Education
The Association between Teachers’ Use of Formative Assessment Practices and Students’ Use of Self-Regulated Learning Strategies
This study was conducted with three Arizona school districts that surveyed teachers and students in grades 3–12 in spring 2019 to better understand the association between teachers’ use of formative assessment practices and students’ use of self-regulated learning strategies and to help shape related teacher development efforts moving forward.
Authors: Reino Makkonen and Karina Jaquet
Publication Date: November 2020
Publisher: Institute of Education Sciences
The Formative Assessment Framework
This formative assessment framework guides Arizona educators and leaders to better understand
what formative assessment is and is not, how learners use it to manage their learning, and what it looks like when practiced by various role groups.
Publication Date: February 2024
Publisher: Arizona Department of Education
The Impact of Formative Assessment and Learning Intentions on Student Achievement
This brief begins with an analysis of current research linking formative assessment to academic performance and then moves into a discussion of learning objectives’ impact on student outcomes.
Publication Date: August 2014
Publisher: Hanover Research
The Power of Evidence Use in Formative Assessment
This brief discusses how the process of eliciting, interpreting, and responding to evidence of student learning creates the conditions for teachers and students to shift their conception of learning itself to be one that arises out of and promotes collective knowledge.
Authors: Barbara Jones and Nancy Gerzon
Publication Date: October 2020
Publisher: WestEd
The Student Role in Advanced Formative Assessment Practice: Self-Assessment, Peer Feedback, and Discourse
This paper identifies three critical components of the student role in advanced formative assessment practice and discusses how implementing self-assessment, peer feedback, and discourse help students gain confidence to be able to make decisions about the status of their own learning, to extend that learning, and to envision next steps.
Authors: Nancy Gerzon and Barbara Jones
Publication Date: October 2020
Publisher: WestEd
Using the Formative Assessment Rubrics, Reflection and Observation Tools to Support Professional Reflection on Practice (Revised)
This document provides guidelines for use in observations and reflections on formative assessment practices. Sections address background information on formative assessment, value of informal self-reflection or peer observations as a way to improve formative assessment practice, and a set of rubrics for 10 dimensions of formative assessment practice.
Author: Caroline Wylie and Christine Lyon
Publication Date: February 2016
Publisher: Council of Chief State School Officers