Offer Formative Assessment Opportunities

"Formative assessment can be a powerful way to make teaching and learning more student-centered and more student-directed...[I]nstead of thinking about 'What am I going to teach today?' [switch] to 'What will students learn today and how will I know that they've learned?'" (Jennifer Todd as quoted in, "Student Directed Learning," Every Learner, Everywhere, 2022)

All students in all classes need regular and reliable feedback about their progress with the course material. Arguably, students in large enrollment classes rely on feedback even more because they probably have less personal contact with their instructor(s).

One way to add feedback on student progress to your course is to build in formative assessment opportunities into all aspects of your class from synchronous lecturing to test prep to opportunities for personal enrichment. So, what is "formative assessment," and how is it different from the assessments you may already have in your course? Yale's Poorvu Center for Teaching and Learning defines formative assessment as those, "tools that identify misconceptions, struggles, and learning gaps along the way and assess how to close those gaps," and it tends to be informal. The more common "summative assessment," is used to evaluate student learning in a formal way.

While formative assessment is frequently woven into lectures and synchronous presentations, especially when class sizes are small and the class is interactive, many large enrollment classes rely primarily on summative assessments because interaction can be difficult and grading loads are high in larger classes. But with careful planning, it is easy to add formative assessment opportunities to any class. Here are some ideas:

• Create low-stakes or no-stakes quizzes in Blackboard to allow students to test themselves on content that is likely to trip them up. By pulling questions from a question bank, randomizing question order and answers, and allowing students to take and re-take these quizzes, you are providing a powerful formative assessment opportunity that also prepares students for the ways you write questions and organize summative exams.
• Consider assigning low-stakes or no-stakes homework that students grade themselves during in-person classes. By grading the work themselves, they can interact with their own mistakes in real time. This process leverages the grading step and turns it into another opportunity for student learning.
• Use anonymous pop quizzes in in-person classes, have students turn them in, and then pass them back out in a different order so each student is grading someone else's submission. Grade the submissions in class and discuss. Pop-up quizzes can be very effective instructional opportunities because the unexpected nature of the assessment is likely to slightly increase student stress, even though the quiz is anonymous and doesn't count toward a grade. While it may be counterintuitive, small to moderate amounts of stress have been associated with improvement in memory consolidation and retention.
• Use small dry-erase boards (available free through OIR) and have small groups of students use them to work on problems together during in-person classes. If your class is hybrid or online, try using a shared whiteboard feature in Zoom or Teams Meetings or turn to the Microsoft 365 Whiteboard tool for synchronous or asynchronous use. Curious about how that works? We created a Teaching Today Whiteboard for this issue here; please add to it (requires WSU sign-in)!