Using Assessments in Instruction
3 Modules
Lifetime Access
5.0
Effective formative assessment isn’t just about quizzes and rubrics—it’s a powerful instructional strategy that drives student achievement and engagement.
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Purposeful Feedback and Student Involvement
This course empowers teachers to make assessment a natural, ongoing part of instruction, with a strong focus on actionable feedback, student ownership, and responsive teaching. Whether you're looking to sharpen your feedback techniques, increase student self-assessment, or adjust instruction in real time.
Module 1
Foundations of Formative Assessment
- Involve students in establishing their self-assessments and success criteria.
- Provide high quality of feedback to students that comes from a variety of sources including other students.
- Use your Learning Targets to help formulate the formative assessments.
- Write teacher’s learning targets that are clearly defined and taught, measurable, specific, student friendly, and connected to the learning standards.
- Increase use of rubrics and checklists for students to use to evaluate their progress.
- Use Opportunities to Respond (OTR) including group responses.
Module 2
Responsive Teaching Through Feedback
- Provide feedback that is: timely, instructional, descriptive, meaningful, and should increase a student’s academic achievement.
- Make effective instructional adjustments during the lesson based on individual student responses.
- Teacher provides Think Alouds and modeling to guide students toward being able to be self-evaluative.
- CFU (Checking for Understanding) drives the next instructional steps.
- TAPPLE is used as a questioning strategy.
- Feedback includes verification, elaboration, or explanation based on student responses.
- Teacher provides meaningful repetition on any student responses that are not first time correct.
- Teacher’s use of explicit instructional techniques increases: group responses, corrective & immediate feedback, pause & punch, think time, etc.
- Robust, text dependent questions are used for CFU.
- Teacher recognizes when there is a pattern of errors made by more than one student and stops to reteach.
- For struggling students, teachers guide students towards mastery by focusing on a few points and teaching one small step at a time.
- Teacher’s feedback for successful students should be descriptive naming strengths and suggesting next steps beyond the required work.
- Teacher comments on at least as many strengths and weaknesses.
Module 3
Building Self-Assessment and Peer Feedback Skills
- Explicitly teach methods to students on how to self-evaluate.
- Increase opportunities for students to self or peer assess assignments.
- Increase involvement in students co-creating their self-assessments.
- Provide questions to promote student learning and elicit evidence of errors or misconceptions that need to be corrected or retaught.
- Structure enough time for students to use and apply their new learning/ feedback.
- Incorporate technology into lessons that provide feedback.
- Increase use of Gradual Release of Responsibility: model, leading, testing, retesting.
- See mistakes as learning opportunities and a legitimate part of the learning process.
- Translate standards into student friendly language.
- Teach students to use rubrics/checklists to monitor their own work and the work of their peers during the learning process.
- Design rubrics that contain clearly stated learning targets, success criteria, and descriptive levels or graduations of the quality of the desired work.
- Increase use of graphic and semantic organizers to self-assess.
- Increase use of anchor charts with self-assessment steps to provide a visual clue for naive learners.
- Translate standards into student friendly language.
- Increase use of feedback starting with something positive both on part of teacher and student.
- Increase use of models of good quality work and poor quality work to help students self and peer assess.
- Increase use of differentiated groups and assignments based on assessments.