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What Is Formative Assessment? Everything You Need To Know
Laura Lewis
May 10, 2025
To make teaching and learning as effective as possible, you need easy access to real-time, in-the-moment student data. Without it, you risk missing gaps in student understanding. But where and how can you collect this data, analyze it, and apply it to your instructional practices? Formative assessment, a key tool for enhancing teaching and learning, are the answer.
Today, we’re answering the question, “What is formative assessment?” and exploring ways you can incorporate formative assessments into your daily instruction to collect the data you need.
Formative assessments are a lower-stakes method for tracking students' understanding and monitoring their learning. By lower stakes, we mean these assessments don’t significantly affect a student’s final unit, quarter, or yearly grade. Instead, they’re meant to record students’ progress as they learn to give insights about performance building to that final grade.
Formative assessments are planned, ongoing assessments that can happen at any time during a lesson or unit. They’re integral to the learning process because they provide regular, frequent feedback about how students are learning. The data you collect from formative assessments helps you identify student misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps, which helps you improve your teaching methods and lessons to assess and close those gaps.
They also encourage students to self-evaluate, identifying their strengths and weaknesses and discovering areas where they need more practice or support. Examples of formative assessments include:
[Why is formative assessment important in the classroom?](id-why)
According to the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, formative assessments are a cost-effective and low-preparation way to increase student engagement. You can use them to monitor your students’ academic journeys in the moment. Formative assessments are an excellent way to get real-time insights into what your students understand and adjust your teaching strategies accordingly.
Formative assessments also give teachers the opportunity to provide feedback to students at regular intervals. Assessing students on smaller chunks of material each time allows teachers to give descriptive, actionable, and standards-based feedback to students to help them correct misconceptions and improve their learning.
Beyond teacher feedback, formative assessments also give students opportunities to engage in peer feedback and self assessments. These processes support self-directed learning and encourage student engagement with and ownership of their work when they see the progress they make from one formative assessment to the next.
These assessments also allow students to practice demonstrating what they know, preparing them for higher-stakes assessments that occur throughout the year. Ideally, formative assessments also give you a sneak peek at how students are progressing toward grade-level standards.
The data formative assessments provide give more visibility into how students might perform on interim and end-of-year assessments. That way, you can understand if students “get” what you’re teaching—and make adjustments if they don’t—to better prepare them for higher-stakes tests.
[Types of formative assessments to add to your lessons](id-types)
Formative assessments are diverse, allowing students to demonstrate their learning through multiple modalities. The flexibility and variety help you pulse-check student knowledge and understanding at any time during instruction. Here are some categories of formative assessments that you can incorporate into your lessons to understand what your students are learning and identify areas for extra support:
Pretests
Pretests or pre-assessments happen before you teach a new lesson. Their purpose is to help you find out what students already know about a lesson theme or topic. They also point out potential misconceptions or knowledge gaps. Pretest results can—and should—guide your lesson instruction based on your students’ needs.
The data you gather from a pretest can reveal areas where you can help students build background knowledge, enabling them to better understand the upcoming lesson. Pretest data also highlights review or reteach opportunities from previous lessons and insights into areas where you can extend and accelerate learning.
Checks for understanding
Checks for understanding are formative assessments you can use throughout a lesson to determine what students are learning and retraining as you teach. You can include them at natural pauses in instruction, such as when finishing a page in a textbook, a chapter in a novel, or a group of slides in a presentation.
These formative assessments give you the chance to ask students basic review questions about the material you just taught. They’ll help you see if students understood a particular part of the lesson before you move on. If they still have knowledge gaps, you can go back and review or adjust the instruction to spend more time on unclear topics.
Performance tasks
Performance tasks are activities in which students demonstrate their knowledge by producing a tangible product or performing a task. The tasks can be as simple as completing a worksheet of math problems for homework, writing a book report, or giving an oral presentation in class. They can also include more involved individual and group projects, such as creative writing assignments, science experiments, or real-world applications aligned with students’ interests, to enhance engagement and motivation.
Performance tasks help you understand if students can apply what they learned in class in other formats or settings. With this type of formative assessment, you can see if students can take the knowledge they learned and use it to do a task independently or if they can use it to analyze and synthesize something new.
If students can’t complete a performance task, it doesn’t mean they don’t understand the material. Instead, they may be unsure of how to synthesize what they learned into a new format or situation. In this case, you may reteach some of the material and provide additional strategies and tips on how they can apply what they’ve learned in other situations.
Peer feedback
Peer feedback formative assessments enable students to provide one another with constructive feedback on their work. This type of assessment is particularly useful in ELA classrooms, especially for writing assignments, and to help support language, speaking, and listening skills. During these exercises, students may suggest revisions, next steps, or alternative ideas in one-on-one or small-group discussions. Peers don’t give each other grades or scores. They only provide constructive suggestions.
This collaborative exercise lets students practice their skills and test their knowledge through evaluation rather than construction. Essentially, students assume the role of a tutor or teacher and look at a classmate’s work from that lens.
Ensure students have a primer on how to give and receive feedback before attempting this type of formative assessment. Teach them the difference between constructive feedback and unnecessary feedback when reviewing someone else’s work. It’s also crucial that they understand that receiving feedback can be challenging or uncomfortable, so it’s essential to conduct the assessment correctly and compassionately, promoting a positive and respectful environment.
Self-assessments
Self-assessments help students independently reflect on their knowledge and skill growth. Similar to peer reviews, self-assessments let students look critically at their own work and progress. The goal is to find strengths and areas for improvement. Students don’t give themselves grades or scores but simply evaluate their performance or output.
Self-assessments can be simple, like emoji reactions to how they feel after learning a new topic. These assessments can also be more in-depth, such as with self-edits or reviews of a writing rough draft. In either case, self-assessments help students track their own progress toward goals, make adjustments, and add more practice or studying as needed.
After doing a self-assessment, students should have the opportunity to review important concepts and revise their work if necessary. This promotes a culture of improvement rather than always trying to be right the first time.
[5 hallmarks of a formative assessment cycle](id-hallmarks)
Like any method of testing, formative assessments follow a cycle. The difference in cadence among formative, interim/benchmark, and summative assessments is that formative ones occur more frequently. Below are five steps typically included in a formative assessment cycle to inform lesson planning, data collection, and student learning:
1. Set learning goals
Each lesson should have an objective that states what students need to learn and understand by the end of it. That goal or objective should influence how you teach the lesson, what materials you use, and what type of formative assessment you assign.
It’s also important to convey these learning goals to students. This information will help them understand what they’re supposed to get out of a lesson and what they’ll be assessed on at the end of it.
2. Gather evidence of student thinking and understanding
Formative assessments help you and your students better understand their learning and thinking. These assessments are also a good way to measure students’ progress toward a learning goal or objective. They can influence what types of formative assessments to use and what questions or activities to include.
For some objectives, it might be something as simple as an emoji reaction to gauge how they feel about a topic. For others, the formative assessment might need to check their understanding of knowledge or their ability to produce a tangible product, like a written paragraph.
3. Make time for self-assessment and peer feedback
Unlike interim/benchmark and summative assessments, formative assessments are lower stakes and can be more informal. It’s not always the teacher telling students that they’re right or wrong. Make time for self-assessment and peer feedback throughout the formative assessment cycle.
Self-assessments help students monitor their own progress. They can determine areas where they’re achieving and areas where they need more practice or support. With practice, they’ll be able to recognize these areas themselves without waiting for a teacher to point them out.
Peer feedback gives students the chance to work with and learn from each other. Working with classmates to achieve a common goal can increase motivation and help students become more engaged and active participants in their learning.
4. Provide actionable teacher feedback
Formative assessments are the perfect time to provide actionable feedback for students. The best formative assessment feedback is actionable, meaning it gives students tangible advice about where they went wrong and how to improve. Good feedback is also timely and comes as close to in-the-moment as possible when students are actively learning and engaged in a topic.
A 2009 study by Yigal Attali and Don Powers found that receiving immediate feedback makes it easier for students to correct initial mistakes and avoid repeating them as they continue to learn. The feedback students get during formative assessments can help them when they have to take higher-stakes assessments.
Students can’t—and won’t—get immediate feedback after they’re done with an interim/benchmark or summative assessment. You won’t be able to go over the most missed questions or correct misconceptions in a timely manner. But the more feedback you can give during a formative assessment cycle, the more guiding information students can use and take with them to apply when they’re taking higher-stakes tests.
5. Adjust instruction accordingly
Finally, when you learn from gathering student data and engaging in a feedback loop with your students, all the information you collect can inform instruction. For example, a check for understanding in the middle of the lesson may show students aren’t grasping a concept. You can pivot and spend more time discussing the confusing topic to improve students’ clarity, rather than plowing ahead with the pre-planned lesson.
The data you receive also helps affect future instruction. For example, you may identify common misconceptions on a topic from this year’s students, and next year, you can spend more time building background knowledge or identifying other ways to address larger knowledge gaps in those areas to increase clarity.
[What are some challenges associated with formative assessments?](id-challenges)
Although formative assessments are great for progress monitoring and data collection, they’re not without challenges. Here are some of the most common challenges associated with formative assessments and how to combat them:
Time
Creating and grading many formative assessments—especially when you teach multiple classes or grades—can be a challenge. Luckily, building dedicated formative assessments into your lesson plans can streamline the process and save you time.
When making your lesson plans consider at which logical points you can add formative assessments. Do you want to start each lesson with a bell ringer or end with an exit ticket? Do you want students to take a short comprehension quiz after they finish each chapter of a novel? When you plan for these assessment moments it can be easier to make time for them in the classroom.
And to save you time with creating and grading formative assessments, digital tools like Formative can help. Formative allows you to create and customize your own formative assessments, select questions from the Item Bank, or use our AI-powered features to generate questions. And with auto-grading features, you can save time checking all those formative assessments and dedicate more time where you need it most.
Student motivation
Getting students to stay motivated about taking formative assessments could be a challenge. Especially for formative assessments that you don’t grade, students may not see the point in completing them or trying to get the right answers.
Reframing how students look at assessments and progress can help. In most classrooms, the the letter or number grade is the ultimate sign of performance. Students have it in their heads that 100% or an “A” is what they should aim for.
Instead, encourage students to look at their progress. If they receive a lower grade than they’d like on a formative assessment, it just means they have room to improve. Encourage them to ask questions, practice, and get help if they need it so that they can see progress across all their formative assessments, not just the single grade on one of them.
Formative assessment made easy
Formative can help you create, share, and use any type of formative assessment. It’s right in the name! Features of formative that help you pulse-check your students’ progress regularly include:
20+ activity types to keep students engaged and offer them a variety of ways to show their knowledge.
Tools for creating lesson-ready presentations and presenting formative assessments in teacher-paced mode alongside slides, videos, passages, and more.
Real-time student insights from daily activities like bell ringers and exit tickets to power informed instruction.
Standards tagging and overview reports to help identify opportunities for improvement or reteaching.
Assessments sit at the intersections of gaining insights into student learning and providing feedback to guide future success. We’ve identified nine areas where you can level up your assessment questions to better understand what students know, spot their knowledge gaps, and adjust instruction accordingly.
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