Long gone are those days of pen and paper quizzes, students prefer solving multiple choice questions on a digital platform or in virtual classrooms. If you want to sell online courses from your own website or using best platform for selling online courses, you need to be more screen-oriented, minimizing traditional test-taking patterns.

Moreover, quick online assessments help teachers understand which students were focusing on in a class. If they launch courses using online course selling platform regularly and don’t check the understanding or absorption capacity of students, there is no point in taking classes at all. Good teachers adjust assessment strategies for students, great teachers include unique assessment strategies to foster learning for every child.

What is formative assessment?

Formative assessment is a monitoring pattern that provides teachers feedback from students on their learning patterns. It guides teachers with lesson plans which means sheets and assignments.

A child can identify his strengths and weaknesses through formative assessment. A summative assessment is also important but only helps students score a grade and encourage cumulative learning pattern. However, the formative one continues throughout the course lessons, improving learning gaps and identifying students who lag.

Distance learning and formative assessment

With distant learning patterns through the pandemic, students have lost touch with how a traditional classroom feels. Back in the day, teachers could regularly observe student behaviors in live classes and understand how much attention they could pay. Making similar observations through the screen is difficult because multiple students attend the class, all of which are not visible simultaneously. Is the teacher supposed to focus on the presentation screen, connectivity, or student reaction? According to priority, they focus more on their teaching quality rather than the students.

Hence, the best way to collect feedback is through formative assessment. Here are a few ways to use formative assessments in online classrooms;

Digital journals

Students cannot process or receive information at the same speed. You can test this by asking simple questions. Everyone should know the answer, right? Even though they are aware of what the correct answer could be some won’t raise their hands because of social anxiety or self-doubt or low self-esteem issues. Some will raise their hand promptly because they are sure of themselves and process information differently.

For this purpose, teachers need to create a digital journal to document individual progress marks for students. The entire lesson in itself is a formative assessment because teachers receive feedback on the natural behavior pattern of their wards.

It is also a learning experience for educators. When they start a session, they might have a few new faces, or the entire batch can also change. It might take a long time to understand them if teachers don’t have a mental or digital journal record.

Besides performing journaling activities yourself, allow students to maintain a digital journal in the learning management system of the institution. Here, they are free to fill in anything in their language to break down schedules into simplest patterns that are easily understandable. What they input in the everyday journal should be useful, and not strictly monitored by teachers because that takes the freedom of journaling.

Peer-to-peer evaluation

If you find your students getting upset over constant assessments every week, you might want to tone down on official disks and allow peer-to-peer evaluation. Give them group projects to work for. It will take away the formative assessment requirement for at least a month because all you have to do is observe compatibility strengths and weaknesses as they work through the projects. They evaluate each other and come together with the best plan for distributing work and learning soft skills.

Virtual escape tickets

We use exit tickets even in traditional classrooms. Every student gets a ticket virtually where they can record their response before leaving the classroom- they are not allowed to leave without filling out the response card. To ensure that student data is information, and no student can view the response of the other, teachers should personalize their features and assure every child that the response is kept confidential.

Open-ended questions are the best prompts to use for escape tickets. You can use ideas such as;

• Why was today’s lesson difficult?
• One thing that you liked about the lessons.
• How is this lesson relevant in practical life?
• Today was fun because-
• Is this topic important for future understanding of different concepts?
• What is something you still cannot understand?
• Will a revision class be necessary for the topic, before exams?

An open-ended question does not have any specific answer. It thrives off the unique perspectives every child has created. It is thought-provoking and impactful, the most effective for formative assessments.