Formative Assessment & Practice

Deploy a frequent, low-stakes way to monitor student learning

Through formative assessment, students have multiple opportunities to engage, apply, and practice new knowledge, concepts, and skills. Throughout the process, they receive timely, non-punitive, constructive, and targeted feedback.

Professors can use formative assessment to identify opportunities for differentiated instruction and to tailor high-stakes summative assessment. For students, formative assessment fosters increased self-confidence and higher levels of comprehension while also normalizing mistakes as a part of the learning process.

Frequent opportunities to practice

Students have frequent opportunities to apply and reinforce their understanding of course materials, allowing them to refine their skills and build confidence as they progress. Ultimately, this contributes to deeper comprehension and retention.

Low- to no-stakes assessments

Students are evaluated based on their understanding and progress in the course with no impact on their grades. Ideally, these low- to no-stakes assessments are not graded and are embedded into course materials and virtual experiences. If they are graded, these assessments are not heavily weighted in students' final grades. These assessments are designed to be low-pressure and create an environment where students can comfortably engage with the material, make mistakes, and learn from them without fear of negative repercussions.

Timely and targeted feedback

Feedback is prompt and relevant information is provided to students about their performance, helping them make immediate and informed adjustments to enhance their learning and understanding. Timely feedback engages students, facilitates self-regulation, addresses misconceptions, builds confidence, and promotes a growth mindset. Targeted feedback means that specific and cumulative information is provided to students based on their individual performance. It addresses their unique strengths, weaknesses, and areas for improvement, guiding students toward a deeper understanding of the course content and supporting their ongoing learning progress.

Mistakes become learning opportunities

When students make mistakes, they are encouraged to reflect on what went wrong. When they receive targeted feedback, they have an opportunity to adjust their approach, deepening their understanding of the subject matter. This approach fosters a growth mindset, where students view errors and mistakes as integral to the learning process rather than as failures, enabling students to incrementally build their academic self-confidence in the subject.

Instructors who want to provide frequent opportunities for students to practice run into a common challenge: for that practice to be helpful, students need feedback, and feedback is often an incredibly time consuming activity for instructors. Delivering formative assessment & practice digitally can help address and alleviate this pain point. Features like automated grading, multiple question sets, multiple attempts, and guided practice activities allow for students to frequently practice and get targeted feedback with low- to no-stakes and allow instructors to spend less time grading and more time on other high-impact practices.

Instructional Examples

The Instructional Example Library features a wide range of digitally-enabled examples sourced directly from instructors who are using technology to implement evidence-based teaching practices in their courses. These examples focus primarily on math, chemistry, and statistics gateway courses, but are applicable across disciplines.

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Have an Example of Your Own?

Help us build our Instructional Example Library! We are looking for contributions from higher education instructors across disciplines who use technology to enable evidence-based teaching practices. To learn more and to submit an example, please visit the form page linked below. Thank you for helping us support the field.

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