Students don’t have to know they are being tested. Use live or computer-based games and puzzles, brief exit tickets, and group error analyses.

Take the stress out of tests. Brief, daily quizzes not only can check students’ understanding, but may ease students’ anxiety about challenging subjects.

Give students explicit feedback, such as substantive written comments on a quiz rather than just a check. 

Keep accountability separate. Formative assessment should not be used for grades or accountability, as summative tests like state assessments or end-of-chapter tests are used. They should be used to determine "how to bring students into grade-level instruction, not whether to bring them into it." 

Principal’s corner. Support from administrators and a culture encouraging formative testing are among the biggest predictors of teachers implementing the approach successfully. Principals should avoid requiring any one kind of assessment. Teachers will need time together to plan skills or concepts to test and share the assessment practices they've found most helpful. Technology–from basic clickers to adaptive assessment suites–can be used to record student data quickly.

The challenge: Teachers at Simmons Elementary School in the Hatboro-Horsham school district in Pennsylvania needed a way to quickly spot common holes in students’ math understanding without breaking up the normal flow of the class.  

The solution: Fifth grade teachers turned the standard homework review into an opportunity to teach students how to evaluate their own work, as well as a quick way for teachers to identify and address common skills gaps or patterns of misunderstanding. At the start of each math class, students mark the problems they struggled with in the last assignment on a “homework help board.” Other students chime in if they also had difficulty, before teachers engage them in a discussion of how they worked the problems. This gives teachers a quick sense of which concepts need a short intensive lesson, while creating a class culture that encourages students to seek help and reflect on their understanding. Teachers code specific problems based on the foundational skill that should have been learned so they can share data with colleagues.