Teachers use a variety of methods to assess what students are learning during and at the end of lessons. These include simple questions, short performance tasks, journal or notebook entries, surveys, or end-of-class “exit tickets.” These frequent checks provide information about students’ current understandings and their sense of themselves as knowers and doers of the content and help the teacher adjust instruction in the moment or from one lesson to the next. Teachers design formative assessments that account for procedural and conceptual understandings, disciplinary practices, metacognitive processes, and development of productive identities, and should value multiple, diverse expressions of what counts as “knowing.”
Teachers can check for understanding in ways that actively combat patterns of inequity in classrooms. Without skillful, frequent formative assessment, teachers risk perpetuating reductionist views of content (e.g., only checking for right/wrong answers), overlooking student knowledge and skill, and teaching lessons that do not attend to the students in their class. When well designed and used, formative assessments can provide teachers with useful insights about how students are engaging with the content, and this, in turn, helps teachers strengthen instruction to deepen students’ understanding. Because formative assessments can be frequent and varied in form, they can help teachers to see what each of their students knows and can do. The information garnered through diverse formative assessments informs the adaptation of instruction and supports every student where they most need it.