7 Key Benefits of Using Formative Assessment to Increase Student Growth

The purpose of formative assessment is to create a learning-based evaluation in education rather than a testing-based culture. For centuries, teachers have relied on various appraisal techniques to assess student performance and progress. 

Why formative assessments now? It helps both students and teachers to understand each other better. It also allows teachers to differentiate each student's knowledge and decide on the unique teaching methods to help them improve. 

Formative and summative assessments are the two main types of assessments we use. Summative assessments are more familiar to us why because of practices like exams, grades, and report cards. Formative assessments are much simpler. Teachers use it daily lectures and classes to evaluate students. For example, in-class discussions, quick questions, surveys, etc., fall under formative assessment. 

Need to learn more about formative assessment? Let's dig deeper and explore more it below. 

Table of Contents

What is Formative Assessment?

As we already discussed, teachers use quick questions and surveys to identify the learning needs of each student. It helps teachers realize misconceptions, learning gaps, and difficulties each student face in the classroom. Unlike summative assessment that happens once in a scheduled interval, we can use formative assessment throughout a class or course. 

The advantage of formative assessment is that it doesn't include marks or grades and doesn't encourage student comparisons. It focuses mainly on the personalized learning process rather than academic grades. It allows teachers to gather important information that helps them improve their teaching patterns in the future. Students will also understand their strengths and weaknesses, and that will empower them to become better learners. 

Why Is It Important to Use Formative Assessment in Schools?

Identifying what precisely goes through student mindsets can be tricky while they're still learning. Therefore, it is important to use formative assessment in schools. A strategic formative assessment will solve this issue to a great extent. Let us look at the ways to create a formative assessment. 

Entry and exit slips

Entry and exit slips are the best reasons why formative assessment is important in education. Asking a few quick questions to students at the beginning and end of classes will make a big difference. You can start asking questions to students about previous sessions and see whether they're following the topics. You can either write it on board or a chart paper so that every student can share his views. In the same way, you can also ask questions like "what did you learn today?'' at the end of each session. 

Quizzes and polls

Quizzes and polls are the best way to determine whether your students follow your classes as much as you think you have taught them. It is the purpose of formative assessment. You can also use tools like Edisapp or any other school management system to conduct polls and quizzes and evaluate the individual response of students. 

Interview assessments

Do casual interviews with students inside the classrooms. It will help you gain in-depth insights into their understanding of topics. It just takes five minutes of your time to interact with every student about lessons and projects. A school management system can help you communicate with students easily and share your valuable suggestions and thoughts with them.

Visual art

It would help if you use visual elements in your assessment tools. Students will be able to synthesize their learning and look beyond the academic contents if they can draw, create, etc. Why formative assessment is important because visual art helps students to understand topics quickly and easily. 

Self-assessment

Self-assessment tests will help you find quickly what each student thinks about your classes. It also allows students to find out their strengths and weaknesses with ease. Simply ask students to identify their weak points and strong points. Ask them to write those areas on the classroom board and let all students discuss and find solutions. 

You can also use objects to distinguish their understanding of the topic learned. 

For example, you can use colored cups such as green, yellow, and red. A green cup indicates that a student understood the lesson, a yellow cup states that a student did not understand a few points but learned a majority of the topics. A red cup tells you that a student did not understand anything taught in the classroom.          

Top 7 Benefits of Using Formative Assessment

How can you improve student performance? Well, you need to monitor student progress and adjust your teaching strategies. Then, it will be easier to improve student performances. It is the critical reason why schools should implement formative assessment in learning. In addition, a well-planned formative assessment will give you the following benefits:

1. Better focus on goals

One of the critical benefits of formative assessment is that it allows students to concentrate more on their objectives. Since teachers check the progress and difficulties of students regularly, students will have a clear target on their goals. Teachers can identify the student's struggles and fix them quickly before they go off the track. 

2. Improved learning environment

What are the advantages of formative assessment? Firstly, it helps teachers to identify the needs of a student easily. Once teachers understand the exact needs of students, they can build a constructive environment and use cases to promote better learning.

3. Better performance

The purpose of formative assessment is to offer regular feedback to students and teachers in achieving their goals. So, it helps both teachers and students to perform better in their functional areas. Teachers will understand the exact needs of students while students will learn about their strengths and weak points. 

4. Increased student engagement and motivation

Another benefit of formative assessment is that it helps students to think out of the box. Formative assessment allows teachers to help students connect their classroom goals with real-world examples. It makes them feel engaged and motivated since real-world examples are easier to visualize and understand.

5. Positive learning process

One of the advantages of formative assessment is that it helps focus on positive learning. In other words, it enables teachers to handle students better, and students can learn better. They can devise strategies for improvement rather than procrastinate over what went wrong.

6. Personalized learning experiences

As you know, every child is special and unique. For instance, teachers can quickly decide on tailor-made teaching strategies that work better with each student. It allows teachers to provide personalized learning experiences to students who need support.

7. Promotes self-learning

Another significant benefit of formative assessment is that it promotes the skill of self-learning in students. After a few rounds of formative assessment tests, students can set their own goals and objectives hassle-free. They will also develop the practical skills and capabilities required to solve any problem. 

Formative Assessment and Student Growth

It helps you gather quick feedback on improving your teaching process and promotes student growth. As you already know, teachers can use formative assessment to tweak their teaching techniques to enhance student growth. It allows teachers to make quick decisions and align their strategies with students' requirements. Students find it useful because they can analyze these results to change and improve their learning process. 

Teachers are also supposed to provide descriptive feedback to students which tells them about their performance and how to improve it. One of the advantages of formative assessment is that it is the most effective way to determine student growth over time. It is because formative assessments are conducted throughout the academic year rather than at fixed intervals.  

Formative assessment lets us know if a student can follow the classroom teaching perfectly or not. One of the benefits of formative assessment is that it helps create an immediate impact on a student's learning capabilities and growth dynamics. 

How Does Edisapp Promote Formative Assessment?

The need for formative assessment in schools is tremendously increasing nowadays. Therefore, a good majority of school managements are searching for a comprehensive educational app that will help them incorporate formative assessment into their system. 

Eliot, one of the global leaders in educational technology platforms, has created a comprehensive school management app called Edisapp, an all-in-one, cloud-based platform to help you manage all school activities easily. 

Let's see how Edisapp promotes formative assessment in educational systems. 

Teaching and learning: - It facilitates full-fledged AI-driven digital content for teaching and learning. 

Assessment question: - Comes with a pre-built set of configurable questions and templates that can even be used remotely. 

Students' participation: - Access and attend to questions and other informative content from anywhere, empowering hundred percent student participation. 

Evaluation: - AI-driven marking using self-marking to eliminate marking errors and counting mistakes. Do more in less time. 

Student feedback: - Provide personalized feedback to students as voice notes, video messages, or texts. Share insights and report cards with parents in a single click.

File sharing and storage: - Manage all the student data, insights, reports, and other files securely, and share them automatically with parents and the principal. 

Identifying trends: - Identify the knowledge gap and performance trends quickly.  

Conclusion

Assessments are an integral part in teaching and learning. It gives insights into teaching areas that need improvements and points out students who need extra support and guidance, etc. 

You have to choose a fully-equipped school management system like Edisapp to incorporate formative assessment in your school to increase student growth. 

Write to info@eloit.com to schedule a free demo.