What are formative assessments?

Formative assessments can be a powerful way for students to engage more often and more completely in course materials and retain more information, prepare better for summative assessments, and to learn the course material more deeply.

Unlike summative assessments, which assess how much students have learned in your course, formative assessments focus more on getting students to engage with how they’re learning the material for your course.

Consequently, they can be deployed multiple times across the semester in order to allow your students to practice necessary skills, study for exams or final papers, engage in group work, and more.

Due to the nature of formative assessments, they’re more flexible and malleable than summative assessments. There are many ways you could use them in your course, and many different ways they could look. Below, you’ll find a list of some ways you can start to incorporate formative assessments into your course and help your students think more about how they’re learning the material for your class.

How can you use formative assessments in your course?

Formative assessments can take many forms. Some of the most popular are things like quizzes, games, group activities, and other project-based assignments. However, not all of these will work in large lecture courses like the one you’re teaching. Here are some ideas for how to use them in a 100+ person class:

Create practice quizzes. Students can access these quizzes in the lead-up to exams and after the introductory lectures, and they can be used for study. We recommend using them as a graded activity, even if only for a few points, to encourage students to interact with them. These grades could be based on performance, but could also just be a participatory grade – if the student completes the assignment, they receive some points for having done so. Moreover, we recommend allowing students to take them multiple times, essentially turning them into flash cards or practice tests. Courses that incorporate interventions like this have seen a modest improvement in exam scores from the students who use the practice quizzes to study for the exams. Additionally, if you set them up in ICON it can be easy for you to use them each semester, add more questions and options to diversify the question pool and make the assignments more meaningful for students to engage in multiple times.

Group practice work. Many of our large lecture courses also have a discussion section or component. In these discussion sections, design activities for your students to complete in small groups. These activities should encourage your students to reflect on what they’ve learned in the class that lecture, developing and explaining these concepts to each other. By having to put them into their own words, they can both clarify the topics for their fellow students as well as deepen their own understanding of the material. We recommend having these assignments be graded to encourage participation, but since they are group-based, it should be easier for students to succeed in them. Moreover, those leading the discussion section (instructors or teaching assistants) should cycle through the classroom, listening to the conversations occurring and offering clarification and guidance as necessary.

What results can you expect from incorporating formative assessments into your course?

While it can be hard to quantitatively assess the effectiveness of formative activities in your course, some of our programs have seen success in utilizing these types of activities. Specifically, HHP:1100 began using practice quizzes before each exam. This allowed students to engage with the materials multiple times before seeing it on the exam, and each quiz would be different from the last, as the instructors wrote multiple questions and pulled from a bank for each instance. The class average was between 2 and 3 attempts, which meant that most students were using these to study from more than once, and the instructors of HHP:1100 saw an increase in test scores when compared to previous semesters.

By allowing students to engage multiple times with these topics, they can come to understand the how and the why behind important concepts in your course and that can help them not only with their exams but with retention of the salient topics of your course after the semester, as well.

Who can help if you’re interested in incorporating formative assessments into your course?

If you would like to explore how you could use this in your course, please reach out to the Center for Teaching for assistance and guidance on how best to implement these activities.

If you want to incorporate more quiz work into your ICON site as formative activities, reach out to the Instructional Services team at its-helpdesk@uiowa.edu and they can direct your query to someone who can help you.