Any great teacher or coach is constantly assessing performance and giving timely and direct feedback. Formative assessments are paramount in the math classroom. There are some assessments that are more formal than others, but you have to plan them in order to make sure they happen. Also, you shouldn’t do assessments just because you’re supposed to do them. As teachers, we use, and value, formative assessment because they inform our feedback to students and the way we’ll deliver instruction in the future.
Sometimes you need to slow down the instruction, or maybe you need to speed things up. Formative assessments reveal the misconceptions and missteps that students make. You can respond quickly and reinforce the correct process for students. If you just give assignments and correct them for grades, without specific feedback or adjustments in teaching, then the assessments won’t have the impact on learning that you crave.
I’d like to share a list of formative assessment that I love to use when working in my grade level math class as well as my intervention classes. Usually, intervention classes are smaller and that gives you so much more opportunity to assess and give feedback. The best math teacher I ever worked with was also the teacher that gave more specific and timely feedback than anyone else I’ve ever seen. I watched the impact her daily feedback had on her students over the year. It reinforced for me that the more feedback you give students, the more you help students move forward in their math learning.
Math mazes to start class
I start each class with formative assessments in the form of math mazes. This is my go to as students walk into the room. They pick up their maze and start working on it. The daily maze has problems related to what we’re learning. Watching students work through their daily maze gives me information about where the whole class is with the topic as well as each individual student.
I personally check each student’s maze every single day. This gives me a chance to check in with every student and give them feedback. If they have no errors, then they get a stamp and they move onto the problem of the day (a more complex problem that takes some time to work through). When there’s an error I either ask students a probing question, or give them a quick pointer. This gives formative assessment to every students every day. It’s a great way to start my class each day and ensures that students get feedback and I get a snapshot of how my students are doing. I’m not sure what’s better than that.
Now I’ve added a digital version to all math mazes, so you can use them online or printed out. Digital math mazes are built in Google Slides, and super interactive and fun.
Want to try out a free math maze today? Sign up for the Maze of the Month club and get a free maze on middle school math concepts sent right to your inbox each month. Each maze has 2 versions- a printable & a digital version built in Google Slides (perfect for whatever your classroom looks like!) Plus, you’ll get an adding and subtracting integers maze right away.
YES! Sign me up for the Maze of the Month Club!
Can’t wait to see you there.
Personal whiteboards
There are only a couple of things that I couldn’t live without as a teacher, and personal whiteboard sleeves is one of them. You can pose a question or problem on the board and then you can see the whole class’ response instantly.
Once again, with a quick check you can see how students are doing. Then, you can let students know if they got it or if there is something that they need to go and fix. As a teacher this takes a lot of concentration, but you’ll be able to see students really learn when they go through this process. We use these whiteboards just about every day. As I’m talking about many of the other types of formative assessment, the personal whiteboard sleeves are a tool that can easily facilitate these strategies.
Exit ticket poster
A couple of years ago one of my colleagues had this idea to have a poster with 5 questions on it. Then, we used this poster as a quick go-to for exit tickets. I’ve placed the poster in two different places in my room as well as in students’ notebooks. When it’s time for an exit ticket I can just tell everyone to respond to question 4. Boom! Simple and done.
I give students a post-it or a quarter sheet of paper to complete this exit ticket on. No matter which question I use I get great formative assessment info that helps inform my instruction for the next day.
Task Cards
We use task cards as a practice activity in every unit that I teach. Usually, students don’t have time to complete all of the task cards. One little trick I’ve learned is to keep a couple sets of taskcards on hand as formative assessments. I have student complete the problems on their whiteboards and I can see quickly where they are tripping up.
Taskcards are great for a quick formative assessment- just choose one or two to have all students answer and then move on. (They’re also great for quick sponge activities, cyclical review, and more.)
I’ve added a digital version to all task cards we have available on TPT using Google Slides. Again, this gives flexibility to use this low-prep, high-impact in any classroom setting.
My Favorite No
A few years ago at our school we read the book Making Thinking Visible, and it introduced the strategy of “my favorite no”. It became a fan favorite to use at my school. In this strategy, you give students some form of exit ticket or assessment. Then, you go through their answers and make a pile of yes and no based on who’s got it and who doesn’t yet. Finally, look through the no’s and find the one that illustrates a common misconception or is the closest to being correct.
The next class, share with students your “favorite no” and why you liked it. You can explain what the student got right, and then what we can learn from the mistake they made.
This strategy is super simple and it helps incentivize actually looking through the exit tickets because you have a plan of what to do with them. It also gives students a chance to look at others’ work and try to figure out why an answer was the teacher’s favorite no. It’s formative assessment at its finest.
Google Form
I have loved Google Forms since we started using them years ago. They’re easy to make and assign, and you get feedback right away. Google Forms are my go-to assessment for my intervention class. Students complete one every day and then analyze their errors.
You can use Google Forms to create math problems or reflection questions. Also, you get a lot of information from the responses- they even create little graphs and chart for you. My heart gets a little happy every time I see these graphs and charts that are made for me. With a quick glimpse I can see how students are doing overall. With just a little bit more time, you can also see each students’ quiz individually.
If you have access to tech devices for students, Google Forms are an invaluable way to instantly get formative assessment information.
Which mathematician is right?
There are a variety of ways to analyze errors. The “Which mathematician is right?” strategy is similar to “my favorite no” because students analyze other “students'” work. Then, they decide who they think did the problem correctly and explain why they agree and disagree with hypothetical students’ work. If your students struggle to know why one solution is right and the other isn’t, then they might not really get the concept.
After students have created their responses in writing they can share them with their partner. I like to give them a minute or two to compare their answers with their partners and then let them share out with the class. Everyone doesn’t need to share out, but letting 3 or 4 kids share their insight provides good conversation. This exercise pushes to students to a deeper level of analysis, revealing their understandings or misunderstandings.
Muddiest Point
The muddiest point is an exit ticket where students identify what is still unclear for them. It can be used as an exit ticket on paper, or you can have students write their muddiest point on their whiteboard. It just depends on the situation and how long you think the responses will be. The responses on the whiteboards really shouldn’t be longer that a sentence or they get really hard to read.
You can see which parts of the concept are difficult for everyone at a glance. You might want to start them off with a sentence starter like: After today’s lesson I am still confused about… This gives them the words they need to get started. When all is said and done, once they’ve told you where they’re getting stuck, you can give them some quick pointers to get them back on track.
Fist to 5
I use “fist to 5” insead of thumbs up/thumbs down. There’s a lot of variation in understanding and students can show that one one hand. A one means that they don’t get it at all and a 5 means that it is crystral clear. This is a quick check you can do between the lesson and the practice. It will give you an idea of who to check on at the beginning of the practice.
Emoji scale reflection
The emoji reflection exit ticket is very similar to the 1 to 5 scale except that students shade in the emoji that matches their understanding the best. They also have to justify their choice by writing an I can statement of what they can do or what they need to work on.
Doing this assessment with the emojis seems to take down some student anxiety about self-evaluation. Students are familiar with emojis and they don’t have to show the whole class their response.
Two truths and a lie
Playing two truths and a lie makes a great formative assessment strategy. It comes from a game I remember playing as a child. We often played it to introduce ourselves and we had to create two truths and a lie about our own lives. It’s fun and for math purposes it gets students to identify two correct answers and one lie. They have to think a little differently about the math.
Another twist on this strategy is for the students to create the statements. There’s a lot of thinking that is involved and you’ll see if they can purposely make a mistake. Then, you can read students’ stories to the whole class to review learning. You could really ham it up and act like you are on a tv talk show (or not).
Explain it to an alien
Sometimes a great way to see if students understand something is for them to just explain the steps. Instead of telling them to rewrite the steps you can have them explain it to an alien, a 5 year-old, or a monkey. This will make them have to not just copy their notes, but to use language that makes sense to them AND to someone else who doesn’t know how to do what students have been learning about.
Sentence starters with quick writes
I’ve mentioned sentence starters already in this post, but they deserve their own section. For 5 years I taught English Language Learners. Many of them came to me with no English skills. I learned the power of the sentence stem back then and have used it with all sorts of students.
I find that some students just can’t get started, but with just a little boost they have great ideas and thoughts to write. If you try nothing else from this whole blog post please use sentence starters. Give the kids who need scaffolding some easy support.
See more about how to use this strategy in this short video walk-through.
Kahoot
Kahoot is a game that students love to play. It’s a whole class game and can easily be used as a formative assessment. At the end of the game it gives you the option to save the results to a Google Sheet. It will give you a detailed report of how students did. You can so this quickly at the end of class with a short game of 3 to 5 questions. My favorite Kahoot games are short and sweet.
When playing, you’ll want to have student show their work on a paper or a whiteboard and keep reminding them that getting it correct is better than fast. When you download the report at the end of the game, you’ll quickly see how the whole class does, and each individual student as well.
Quizizz
Quizizz is a similar to Kahoot, but students can go at their own pace (I like to assign as “homework” and turn off the question timer). There is still a game component, but they work on their screeen at their pace. They think it’s fun and you get a lot of data from it. I used to use Quizizz for my daily quizzes. It works well for that.
Making a formative assessment plan
Keep in mind that this is a short list of ideas for formative assessments. One of my favorite math teacher books has 75 formative assessments. So, now make a plan for how you are going to incorporate formative assessment into you class and what actions you will take as a result. We can’t wait to hear more about what you’re doing in your classroom. Let us know on Instagram @ideagalaxyteacher or on Facebook at Math Idea Galaxy.
Thanks so much for reading. Until next time!
