Why Math Teachers Should Prioritize Formative Assessment (2024)

What is formative assessment?

The term “formative assessment” may bring to mind classroom activities such as exit tickets, low-stakes quizzes, surveys, or even games. These are all excellent examples of tools that can be used to inform instruction, but to understand the purpose and function of formative assessment, it’s important to think beyond those individual assessment tools and events and examine how to use the data in a way that informs teaching and learning.

The Council of Chief State School Officers recently updated their definition of formative assessment:

“Formative assessment is a planned, ongoing process used by all students and teachers during learning and teaching to elicit and use evidence of student learning to improve student understanding of intended disciplinary learning outcomes and support students to become self-directed learners.” [1]

This revised definition emphasizes the ongoing nature of the process of formative assessment and reflects the importance of an approach marked by instructional moves, interactions between students and teachers, student agency, and data-driven teaching. Formative assessment is more than issuing a series of small, low-stakes assessments throughout the day — it’s an ongoing and continuous process of systematically knowing and responding to your learners.

Why Formative Assessment Is So Important in Math

Math educator Christine Younghusband uses formative assessment to bring out the excitement in math. She writes:

“When many people think about mathematics, they often think of tests, quizzes, and drills. Memorizing math facts, trying to get the right answer, or doing the “right steps” to an algorithm can sometimes overshadow the true fun of mathematics. As educators, we’re in an exciting position: we can actually bring out the excitement and joy in mathematics by approaching math assessment in a creative way that’s both enjoyable for students, and useful for educators.”

Christine uses high-energy collaborative games in the classroom as tools that both get students excited about math and help her better understand what her students comprehend or need more time reviewing. Importantly, she also uses these games to create a culture of academic risk-taking and self-reflection. (You can read more about Christine’s formative assessment strategies in this blog).

We examine Christine’s example here because her approach to formative assessment reflects a critical understanding: students’ relationship with math is fundamentally tied to their ability to engage with and learn math content. When teachers engage in formative assessment, they learn more about students’ understanding of concepts — which is critical in a discipline that generally captures a wide variety of proficiencies — and they can promote reflection and metacognition, growth mindset, mathematical discourse, and math positivity.

Here are a few more reasons to consider why formative assessment may be critical for your math classroom:

• Learning loss has made it more important than ever to know exactly what students need. If your classroom is like many others in a post-pandemic environment, you may find yourself attempting to differentiate for a widening range of proficiencies, even multiple grade levels apart. To meet students where they are when they’re all over the map, you need more real-time, actionable information about their needs than ever before.
• Just as you need real-time data, students need real-time responses. Many students may lack the resources to respond to feedback meaningfully at home, and interacting with teachers in groups or in 1:1 settings is truly invaluable. Formative assessment can create an outlet for dialogue between students and teachers, allowing students to ask follow-up questions and correct misconceptions quickly.
• Formative assessments support summative assessments. Summative assessments in math can be anxiety-inducing for students. Now that many states have returned to high-stakes testing after a pandemic hiatus, that testing anxiety may be more intense than ever for some learners. Formative assessments can help prepare your class for end-of-year assessments by building on students’ background knowledge, giving you the information you need to adjust instruction to address critical gaps in real time, and simply by building students’ confidence in their abilities. (Try educator Christine’s game for a high-energy test prep formative assessment activity!)

Characteristics of Effective Formative Assessment in Math

However, simply labeling an activity a “formative assessment” doesn’t make it so, and not every assessment tool is created equally. Here are a few characteristics of particularly well-designed and effective tools for formative assessment in math:

• Formative assessment should include a follow-up or action plan. Implementing the assessment activity itself is only the first piece of the formative assessment process. Assessment tools can be used for any purpose — when they are used for formative assessment, they are used to inform instruction. The most important work begins when you review the data and act on it, either through adjusting your whole-class instruction, providing differentiated in-class activities, assigning personalized homework, or conferencing with students one-on-one.
• Formative assessment should be ongoing and adaptable. Formative assessment exists to help you better understand where your students are in their learning journeys — but these journeys are long and winding roads! Continuously engage in the formative assessment process to track the curves in the road, overcome the setbacks, and always adjust your formative assessment strategy to gather the intel you need.
• Allow students to demonstrate learning in more than one outlet, context, and measure. Consider how the activities students do that feed into your formative assessment process allow students to demonstrate their understanding. Do they capture how all of your students best express their learning? Do they account for gaps in resources at home or disabilities and accessibility factors? Your data will be far more accurate if they allow students to demonstrate their understanding in a context that works for them.
• Formative assessment must be implemented with purpose. Exit tickets and opening discussion questions all provide great structure to your lesson routines — but they must serve a specific purpose within your formative assessment process. Always consider what you need to know about student learning and how you plan to iterate instruction based on what you learn.

Formative Assessment in Reveal Math

Reveal Math, our complete K-12 core math program, empowers educators to prioritize assessment throughout the lesson cycle. Reveal Math’s formative assessment approach empowers educators to promote student agency while systematically embedding touchpoints for assessing — and responding to — students’ understanding throughout a lesson.

For example:

• The Ignite! activity opens each unit with new information to kickstart students’ exploration. The teacher can use this activity to assess student knowledge prior to instruction and tie their findings to the Practice and Reflect part of the lesson model, in which students practice the application of the skill taught that day.
• Exit Tickets allow teachers to react to student learning in real-time by providing recommended differentiation strategies. Reveal Math even uses digital autoscoring for Exit Tickets to ease teachers’ workflow.
• Math Probes target common misconceptions and allow teachers to see what students need in real-time.
• The Bring it Together activity, featured in the Teacher’s Edition of Reveal Math, provides teachers with questions to check for student understanding, along with common misconceptions and how a teacher could address them.

Of course, as we’ve established, the activities themselves are only a piece of any comprehensive formative assessment strategy. Reveal Math also provides educators with the tools they need to collect and make meaning from data. For example, the Readiness Diagnostic, which opens every unit, provides teachers with information about students’ initial level of understanding and tracks progress toward mastery throughout the unit. When students complete Exit Tickets online, teachers can review correct response rates at a glance to adjust instruction for the following lesson.

All the data teachers gather by using the tools in Reveal Math can further support informed instruction through differentiation opportunities in the Teacher’s Edition — making formative assessment purposeful and actionable.

To support your formative assessment system, we’ve created these three free data trackers:

Grades K-2:

Grades 3–5:

Grades 6–12:

For more insights and strategies in PreK-12 math education, see:

https://medium.com/inspired-ideas-prek-12/math/home

For more on Reveal Math, see: