5 Formative Assessments You'll Love to Use for Large Groups
If you're feeling stuck in assessing your students, these five 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 have 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
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
Examining Elementary School Teachers’ Perceptions of and Use of Formative Assessment in Mathematics
This article shares survey results of 65 teachers across grade levels. Findings indicate teachers find formative assessment beneficial for identifying gaps in learning, offers opportunity to increase student learning, and supports their teaching practices.
Authors: Christie L. Martina, Maryann Mrazb, and Drew Polly
Publication Date: March 2022
Publisher: International Electronic Journal of Elementary Education
Formative Assessment and Feedback Techniques that Engage, Inform and Encourage
In this webinar, participants will be engaged in exploring everyday use of five 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
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
Teachers’ Role in Formative Assessment
This resource explains how teachers using formative assessment notice and respond to student learning in relation to the learning goals and success criteria. It discusses how the teacher role shifts and supports student learning.
Publication Date: April 2024
Publisher: Arizona Department of Education
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 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
Understanding Formative, Summative, and Interim Assessment and Their Role in Student Learning
This article alleviates confusion as to what types of assessments are administered when, what data they provide, and how they benefit teachers, students, and families. It provides a quick rundown on the three main assessment types and what they are used for.
Author: Kathy Dyer
Publication Date: June 2024
Publisher: NWEA