5 Strategies for Formative Assessment in The Digital Classroom

Formative assessment can be conducted in a number ways in your digital classroom. By using the tools that are already at your fingertips, you can move from questions like: “Do you have any questions?” to tasks that assess deeper understanding and call for critical thinking; plus, your students will be engaged! You can also reconfigure typical turn-taking and increase participation from quieter students, or provide more equal space to international students who may have differing classroom culture norms. Here you will find 5 quick strategies to formatively assess (and engage) your students throughout your live sessions. 

1. Reactions

Using your reactions tool, select YES if you could clearly explain this task to your classmate right now or a NO if you would rather be the one who gets the explanation. 

Their responses will indicate to you if you can introduce more information or if there is some clarification needed.

2. Chat

In chat, send me a direct message with either a question you still have about this concept OR a message that you’re ready to continue building upon this concept.  

You can answer students’ questions yourself, or you could call out the questions without naming students. If other students also cannot answer this question, you might review that material again. If students can answer the question, then it has turned into a great moment of collaborative learning.

3. Breakouts

In your five-minute breakout room, first take 1 minute to plan how to explain to a layperson a new concept from today’s live session or this week’s asynchronous material.. Then take 1 minute each to practice explaining to your partner as if they were a layperson, and in the last two minutes, you can provide feedback and discuss any questions.

This activity has students think about their learning, and this metacognitive task serves to solidify and retain their knowledge. You can also have students share out some of their layperson explanations in a whole group debrief to gauge if your students are on track.

4. Annotation

With your annotate tool on a whiteboard, do two things. First, find an error or something that can be improved. Second, provide feedback so that it is correct or even better.

Students can apply what they know and reveal to you if they have fully grasped key concepts and ideas, and by having students provide a correction as well, they are applying what they know.

5. Polling

Please let me know if you think this statement is true or false by responding to the poll. 

Polls can be a great way to get quick, quantifiable, and visible data to inform your live sessions. Pairing a true/false or agree/disagree with a statement that invokes critical thinking helps you and your students visually see the group’s understanding as well as for the individual their own understanding. You can also anonymize the poll so that they feel free to respond honestly.

Try out any of these, and let us know how it goes for you. If you have other tried-and-true strategies, feel free to share them in the comments below.