How Real-Time Formative Assessment Data Helps Teachers Teach

Formative assessment data can help educators personalize learning and support learning gains throughout the year

Learning-oriented evaluation techniques like formative assessment are becoming more popular as teachers prioritize addressing unfinished learning. Unlike summative assessment data, formative assessment data provides teachers with right-on-time insights to help guide instructional decisions and make a critical impact on student growth.

As part one in a two-part series, this blog covers the importance of real-time formative assessment data on personalized instruction. In part two, we discuss how real-time formative assessment data helps administrators lead.

What is formative assessment?

First, let’s review the purpose and function of formative assessment. Formative assessment evaluates student understanding at various points during lessons and highlights areas of improvement throughout the learning process. In other words, formative assessment powers the continuous teaching and learning process with frequent, timely, and specific feedback tied to each student’s comprehension goals and objectives.

For most students, formative assessments are low-stakes—they have a low point value or no effect on a student’s grade. The goal of formative assessment is not to provide a final grade, rather data points that measure student learning. The real-time student performance data that formative assessments offer is central to a data-driven classroom.

The Benefits of Real-Time Formative Assessment Data

Real-time formative assessment data benefits teachers and students by providing critical information about student understanding that helps guide personalized instruction throughout the learning process. A quick analysis of student performance data from formative assessment lets teachers know how the instruction plan needs to be adjusted and where rigor should be increased to meet the needs of each student.

Additionally, formative assessment data gives students timely feedback and facilitates a reciprocal learning process with their teacher. The descriptive feedback that comes with formative assessment creates a responsive and agile learning environment and allows teachers and students to self-correct and improve learning outcomes. With regular feedback, students can close the gap between their current knowledge and their learning goals.

Ultimately, easy access to real-time data can help increase student growth, even for struggling and gifted students—who particularly benefit from formative assessment.

How Formative Assessment Data Benefits Teachers

The most impactful teachers take the time to examine their own practices, and these teachers see better student outcomes than their peers who do not. When teachers understand what their students know before and during instruction—as opposed to finding out what students know at the close of a lesson or unit—they are more effective in accelerating learning gains.

With formative assessment data, teachers can quickly respond to student needs. That might mean providing a different lesson or using a new instructional delivery. Teachers can also respond to formative assessment data to implement corrective instruction for specific students in specific knowledge areas, which is one of the most impactful ways formative assessment data can help teachers teach.

For example, suppose a teacher needs to know which of their 30 plus students are still struggling with geometry axioms introduced last week. In that case, formative assessment data can provide an efficient and effective summary of unfinished learning. Similarly, suppose a teacher has been working with a group of students to provide targeted remediation for an English Language Arts (ELA) unit. In that case, formative assessment data can demonstrate whether their efforts improve students’ grasp and understanding of those specific ELA standards.

How to Incorporate Formative Assessment in the Classroom

There are various ways to seamlessly incorporate formative assessment in the classroom to provide teachers with the data and insights they need to personalize instruction and meet the needs of every student. A comprehensive assessment platform, like Performance Matters, can empower teachers to identify learning gaps, align student performance data to standards, and apply the necessary remediation and enrichment.

Additionally, common formative assessments, created and agreed upon by an entire group of course or grade-level teachers, can equip all teachers—regardless of experience—with an effective way to gauge where students are in relation to the standards at any given moment. By providing a high-level view of all student performance throughout the course, common formative assessments generate immediate student achievement data to monitor progress and evaluate overall instructional effectiveness.

Classroom activities like journaling, thumbs voting, and four corners are easy-to-implement strategies to gather real-time formative assessment data that can work for the blended classroom. A learning management system makes it possible to provide real-time formative feedback to students via course announcements, class discussion, online “exit slips,” and formative quizzes.

Real-Time Formative Assessment Data Powers Student Mastery

Real-time formative assessment data is key to building a foundation for mastery. Parents who may only remember summative assessments will likely welcome the opportunity for their students to receive enhanced, data-driven support from assessments that directly impact remediation and personalized instruction and do not adversely affect their child’s grade.

Use formative assessment data to address unfinished learning with an ongoing evaluation of student understanding of the curriculum to support learning gains throughout the year. With the right tools, teachers can help students make consistent, predictable progress towards meeting the standards on summative assessments.