5 Formative Assessments You'll Love to Use for Large Groups
This video 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
14 Examples of Formative Assessment +FAQs
This post defines formative assessment, provides examples of formative assessment tools and strategies, lists formative assessment resources, and answers questions about formative assessment.
Publisher: University of San Diego
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
75 Digital Tools and Apps Teachers Can Use to Support Formative Assessment in the Classroom
This is an extensive list of digital tools, apps, and platforms that can help teachers and students use formative assessment to elicit evidence of learning. The criteria for choosing those listed included supports formative instructional strategies and ways to activate learners to be resources for themselves and peers; is free or close to it; and allows both students and teachers to take the activator role when possible.
Author: Kathy Dyer
Publication Date: February 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 and understanding.
Publisher: Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, Northern Illinois University
Amplifying Student Agency and Learning Through Formative Assessment
This 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
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
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
This webinar explores 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
This webinar provides a discussion of a recent 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 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 can 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 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 explains three critical components of the student role in advanced formative assessment
practice. Each component is a key entry point for students to engage in using evidence to advance their own and their peers’ learning. With these three processes, 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: Arizona Department of Education