Formative assessment: trends, tools, and techniques
Formative assessment is all about knowing what your students understand while you're still teaching it, not just at the end. It’s low stakes, with no pressure to be right or wrong, creating valuable space for exploration, reflection, and progress. In this CPD toolkit for teachers you’ll find many useful formative assessment ideas, tips, and resources.
What is formative assessment?
Formative assessment is an ongoing process that helps you understand what your students know and where they might need support. Through questions, discussions, quizzes, and observations, you gain valuable insights to guide your teaching. As education continues to shift, formative assessment has adapted. It now integrates technology, and data insights.
Our CPD guide focuses on making formative assessment manageable and meaningful. Discover different ways to ask questions, evaluate feedback, and adapt your teaching.
How can you check what your students really understand, without promoting a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ culture? Feel more tuned into your students’ learning with practical strategies shared by education specialist Timothy Reene in his insightful webinar.
Teachers' most beloved assessment features
The mind map
The mind map in LessonUp is a particularly loved formative assessment feature. Many teachers use it to activate students' prior knowledge, or categorise information.
The spinner
A spinner is a colourful addition to a lesson. Teachers often use the spinner to select a random student to answer a question, without having to choose.
Hotspots
Students enjoy hotspots. They are the perfect interactive buttons to playfully dive into detail, allowing learners to explore images, text and audio with leisure.
Interesting blog articles and learning techniques
Formative assessment examples
Formative assessment helps you monitor student understanding in real time. With LessonUp’s interactive features, you can connect and engage with your students, identify gaps, address misconceptions, and guide learners more effectively. There are many ways to assess understanding without tests. In the blogs below, we explore how to use:
- Mind maps to activate prior knowledge & structure ideas
- Hotspots to present layered information visually
- Quiz questions for real-time feedback and engagement
- Open questions to spark critical thinking and reflection
Blog articles about formative assessment
Formative assessment techniques
Formative assessment helps you respond to your students’ needs as they arise, rather than waiting for the end of a topic or unit. The following eight lessons show how different techniques can be used to track student understanding in real-time and keep students actively involved. They demonstrate ways to:
- Assess prior knowledge at the start of a lesson
- Monitor progress during learning activities
- Encourage student reflection at the end of a topic
- Identify misconceptions and address them on the spot
Explore each lesson to see practical examples of interactive features, ready for you to use or edit. With LessonUp, you can save any slide as a favourite and easily adapt it to your class.👇
Interactive feature slides to apply directly in your lessons
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