QuizCraft / Formative assessment
Formative assessment: what it is, with examples
Formative assessment is checking for understanding while learning is still happening, so you can change what you teach next. Here is what counts, what the research says, and quick checks you can run tomorrow.
Formative vs summative assessment
The same quiz can be either. What decides it is how the results are used. Formative assessment feeds back into teaching and learning while there's still time to act: an exit ticket that shapes tomorrow's lesson. Summative assessment sums up learning at the end: a unit test that goes in the gradebook.
| Formative | Summative | |
|---|---|---|
| When | During a lesson or unit | At the end of a unit, term or course |
| Purpose | Adjust teaching; guide the learner | Measure and report what was learned |
| Stakes | Low or none | Usually graded |
| Examples | Exit tickets, hinge questions, mini whiteboards, practice quizzes | Final exams, end-of-unit tests, standardised tests, final projects |
Quick check: formative or summative?
Six real classroom scenarios. This check runs on the same player your students would see.
What the research says
The case for formative assessment rests largely on Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam's 1998 review Inside the Black Box, which pulled together some 250 studies and concluded that strengthening formative assessment produces significant learning gains. Wiliam later distilled the practice into five strategies:
- Clarifying and sharing learning intentions and success criteria.
- Engineering discussions and tasks that reveal what students understand.
- Giving feedback that moves learners forward.
- Activating students as learning resources for one another.
- Activating students as owners of their own learning.
A related finding from memory research: taking a quiz is itself a learning event. Roediger and Karpicke (2006) found that students who practised recalling material remembered much more of it a week later than those who re-read it. Low-stakes quizzes do double duty: they show you what students know and they strengthen it.
Formative assessment examples you can run in five minutes
- Exit tickets. Two or three questions at the end of class. Make one here.
- Hinge questions. One multiple-choice question at the midpoint of a lesson, with every wrong option tied to a specific misconception. The answer decides whether you move on.
- Mini whiteboards or cards. Everyone holds up an answer at once, so you see the whole room instead of the three hands that went up.
- Retrieval starters. A five-question quiz on last week's content as students walk in. A template plus a projected timer works well.
- Confidence ratings. Students rate how sure they are before seeing the answer; overconfident wrong answers are the ones worth talking about.
- Error analysis. Show a worked example with a mistake and ask students to find and fix it.
Want a model mini-lesson to put in front of a hinge question? Notice how ahaboo's narrated explainer on why the Moon has phases builds one idea step by step, then write your check.
Making the data useful
A formative check only counts if something changes because of it. Decide in advance what you'll do with each result: "If fewer than 80% get question 1, I reteach with a new example tomorrow." QuizCraft's class report sorts questions from hardest to easiest and shows the most-chosen wrong answer, which usually tells you which misconception to address.