Formative assessment is a low-stakes way to check learner understanding while learning is still in progress. It gives educators timely evidence of what learners know, where they are struggling, and what should happen next. Because the purpose is to improve learning rather than assign a final grade, formative assessment can be built into everyday teaching, digital learning, and institution-wide assessment strategies.
This guide explains the formative assessment definition, how it differs from summative assessment, why it matters, and how educational institutions can use practical formative assessment examples to support learners and make better-informed decisions.
Key Takeaways
- Frequent and low stakes: Formative assessment checks understanding during learning, without the pressure of a final grade.
- Actionable: The evidence helps educators and learners decide what to reinforce, revisit, or try next.
- Flexible: Examples include polls, exit tickets, peer feedback, self-assessment, short responses, and digital quizzes with immediate feedback.
- Useful beyond the classroom: When aligned with learning goals and curriculum standards, aggregated results can inform program improvement, professional development, and resource allocation.
What Is Formative Assessment?
Formative assessment definition: A planned, low-stakes process used during learning to gather evidence of learner understanding and use that evidence to improve teaching and learning.
A formative assessment helps educators understand which skills learners have mastered and where they might need support. Crucially, unlike a summative assessment, which takes place at the end of a unit of learning, formative assessment can happen throughout the learning process. This provides a snapshot of progress at the individual and institutional levels, enabling early interventions and adjustments to programs to address emerging gaps.
Four Characteristics of Effective Formative Assessment:
- Embedded within the learning process: Rather than administering a formal exam, formative assessment is integrated into learning activities, allowing institutions to gather timely evidence of progress and identify gaps early.
- Low stakes: The primary purpose is to generate evidence of learner progress rather than assign final grades. Low-stakes approaches can reduce assessment pressure and provide a more accurate picture of understanding and competency development.
- Flexible: Formative assessment approaches should be adaptable to different topics, curriculum goals, and learner cohorts.
- Diagnostic: A formative assessment should give insights into learner strengths and areas for development. This information can support instructional adjustments and broader program-level decision-making.
Why Formative Assessment Is Important for Improving Teaching and Learning Outcomes
The primary benefit of formative assessment is that it provides educators with the data and tools to address learners’ misconceptions before they become ingrained. It also enables instructional approaches and support strategies to be adjusted in response to problem areas.
Because feedback is provided while learning is still taking place, learners can reflect on their understanding, act on guidance, and improve their performance. For example, learners might be asked to draft the opening of an essay or respond to a prompt, after which peer or educator feedback can be used to identify strengths and weaknesses and support further progress. Such peer review activities are doubly valuable, providing additional evidence of understanding while encouraging collaborative learning and engagement with diverse perspectives.
Regular formative assessment can also lead to greater learner confidence and stronger outcomes. By providing ongoing opportunities for feedback and improvement prior to high-stakes summative assessment, institutions can support competency development throughout the learning process rather than evaluating performance only at the end.
At the same time, the resulting data can inform instructional strategy and decisions about resource allocation to improve outcomes across cohorts, programs, and schools.
Practical Examples of Formative Assessments
Here are some formative assessment activities you might encourage educators to implement in your institution:
Peer review
Peer review sees learners give feedback to each other. This can require careful setup to ensure it is relevant and useful, especially for younger learners who may not yet have developed the necessary skills.
One way to do this is to use “What Went Well” (WWW) and “Even Better If” (EBI). This entails asking learners to give their peers one thing they did well and one thing to improve next time. Modeling feedback statements before they begin can be useful in guiding the desired thought processes.
Afterward, educators may want to gather feedback on common errors to incorporate into the next lesson, perhaps by reviewing books or by taking a quick survey of the class to find the most common mistakes.
Quick polls
Polling can provide a snapshot of whole-class progress in moments, using mini-whiteboards, voting cards, colored slips, or online tools that allow learners to vote on a computer, mobile device, or other digital device. The poll results should indicate how many learners in the class understand the key questions.
The advantage of polling is its speed, allowing the educator to use it at any point in the lesson and swiftly address any misunderstandings.
Exit passes
At the end of a lesson, an exit pass can give a window into individual learning. Depending on the subject, the educator could ask learners to answer a science-knowledge question, create a succinct summary of a history topic, or provide an example of a literary technique. These should be noted on a slip of paper and handed to the educator or submitted online.
Not only is this an effective way to cement knowledge, but reviewing the answers should also give a sense of how well each learner has understood the topic. The educator can use these at the start of the next lesson to recap and correct mistakes.
Online mini-assessments
Online assessment brings a wealth of opportunities for both formative and summative testing. You could advise educators to use a cloud-based program like Google Docs to enable remote peer review, or ask learners to submit online polls or quizzes.
Educators could also use a dedicated digital assessment platform, such as TAO, to access a range of innovative question types. Another advantage of such platforms is that learners can receive immediate feedback without waiting for papers to be graded.
How Formative Assessment Connects to Curriculum Alignment and Institutional Goals
Formative assessment is most effective when it’s aligned directly with curriculum standards, competency frameworks, and learning outcomes. One way to achieve this is by embedding assessment criteria into the task itself. For example, learners might use a rubric based on the official assessment framework for the topic to evaluate their own work or provide peer feedback, identifying which criteria they had met so far and which would take them to the next level of performance.
By integrating these frameworks into everyday assessment activities, institutions can generate evidence of progress against regional or other defined curriculum standards throughout the learning process, rather than only at the end of the course.
Digital testing platforms can strengthen this alignment further through intentional test design. Assessment items can be mapped onto specific curriculum standards, while metatags can be used to categorize each question—for example, by topic, skill, or framework level. This makes it easier for assessment and program leaders to ensure that formative assessments cover each aspect of the framework and measure the intended learning outcomes.
At an institutional level, formative assessment data can provide valuable insights into curriculum implementation. By identifying and addressing factors in underperformance, schools can target interventions and allocate resources more effectively and equitably. The data can also inform decisions on staff professional development.
Conclusion
Formative assessment is a low-stakes approach that can be used throughout the learning cycle to generate timely data on learner progress. This provides useful evidence of understanding, supports ongoing feedback and intervention, and enables institutions to identify and address learning gaps before they become entrenched.
This can help drive improvement at both the learner and institutional levels, including greater equity and inclusion through a better understanding of patterns of learner performance. The resulting insights can inform curriculum implementation, resource allocation, and broader educational decision-making.
A potential next step might be to explore how to build comprehensive digital assessments that use multiple question types and adaptive technology to provide more detailed information about learner progress. Open educational resources can also be integrated into assessments to build engaging multimedia tests, including formative ones.
Find Out More About Digital Assessment
Digital assessment can be a quick, easy, and engaging way to deliver formative testing. To find out more about how TAO could help you integrate digital formative testing into your team’s assessment strategy, schedule a demo.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main purpose of formative assessment?
Its main purpose is to improve teaching and learning while learning is underway. It shows what learners understand, where support is needed, and which next step is most appropriate.
Is a quiz a formative assessment?
It can be. A quiz is formative when it is low stakes and its results are used to provide feedback or adjust learning. The same quiz could be summative if it is used mainly to assign a final grade.
Should formative assessments be graded?
They are usually ungraded or carry little weight because their purpose is to reveal understanding and support improvement. Institutions should make the purpose and consequences clear to learners.
How often should educators use formative assessment?
Use it often enough to guide meaningful decisions, but not so often that it interrupts learning. A brief check at a key point in a lesson or learning sequence is usually more useful than frequent activities with no planned response.