10 Simple and Effective Ways to Check for Understanding

As a new educator, a strange thing has happened to you.

You’ve become an obsessive collector of “All Things Teaching.”  If you believe it will make your teaching life just a bit simpler or more effective, you want it! 

Well, this article is for you.  Every one of these ten ways to check for understanding has been tried and tested over the years.  They work.  Pick one or two to try this week!

Formative assessment is a super tool for teachers.  

Assessment is when you find out what your students know.  Think of traditional tests or projects.  

Formative assessment refers to quick, informal check-ins while you’re still teaching a concept.  You want to see right now if your students got something.  Formative assessment lets you know if can move on or if you need to reteach something.

Regularly checking for understanding is, arguably, the most important form of assessment.  It’s a super tool for teachers because it accomplishes so much! 

• • See what your students know right now? Check.
  • Adjust your lesson on the fly? Yep.
  • Provide intervention for struggling students?  Sure! 
  • Know how your students are feeling about something?  That too.
  • Let you know if a new instructional strategy is working?   Yes, formative assessment does that also.

Checking for understanding is vital but should be low-stakes for students.

Unit tests, major projects, and other traditional high-stakes assessments can lead to near-adversarial interactions with students.  (“Can I take the test tomorrow?” or the increasingly popular, “You never taught us that.”) 

On the other hand, formative assessment can be — depending on your approach — ungraded.  It is a quick check, an exit ticket, or a warm-up question.  Unlike tests, a formative assessment is a friendly, low-stress strategy that assists learning.  Because of that, formative assessment allows you an authentic measure of student learning. 

For veteran teachers, formative assessment is a daily (sometimes multiple times a period) activity to check in with every student in the room.

Below are ten ways to quickly check for understanding that can be mixed, matched, and used in various ways. 

10 Ways to Check for Understanding

1. Exit tickets

An exit ticket (or exit slip) refers to a brief activity or set of questions students answer before they leave class.  Typically, students can complete an exit ticket in about two minutes.  Questions target specific learning goals, and student responses help you adjust tomorrow’s lesson.

Resource: editable, several different formats (with and without lines), and half and ¼ sheets, possibly including self-assessment rating (1-5 on confidence)

2. Think-Pair-Share

Students think or write about a question of your choosing.  You then give them time to briefly discuss the material with a partner.  Feel free to direct the discussion as you see fit…”With your partner, identify one idea from today’s lesson you’re sure about and one idea you’re still unclear on.”  Students then share ideas with the class. 

3. Corners

For a more active formative assessment, ask review questions and then prompt students to head for a corner of the room that represents possible answers.  Once there, students discuss their rationale before sharing it with the class.  This works best with questions that are complex or lend themselves to justification.

Example: Which cause of World War I do you consider to be the biggest reason for the outbreak of war: Militarism, Alliances, Imperialism, or Nationalism?  Provide reasons for your choice.

4. Equity Sticks

Equity sticks are a randomized method of calling on students.  In one version of this formative assessment, you write the name of each student on a popsicle stick.  (This is typically a first-week task in my class.)  The sticks are all put into a container.  You (or a student) draw a name. 

Equity sticks are effective because everyone knows they have an equal chance of being called on.  Students stay engaged, aware, and ready to respond.  Equity sticks work best if you use them regularly and practice with low-stakes questions when first implementing them so that they become part of the classroom culture.  It is important to set the tone that this is not a matter of “gotcha” but rather a way to get a lot of voices answering questions quickly. 

If you would like to try a randomized system for calling on students, please read “How and Why You Should Be Calling on Your Students” for tips on helping students participate successfully.

5. Discussions

Using discussions as formative assessment can be a way to gauge understanding while also encouraging student voice. You can structure the discussion around a topic, a few big-picture, analytical questions, or multiple comprehension questions.  Generally, teachers choose to tally each time a student participates and award participation points for the discussion.  

Some teachers get more detailed with different tally marks to indicate correct answers versus incorrect answers, repeating what someone else said versus an original idea, textual evidence, real-world connections, etc.  

6. Quizzes

A tried and true method of formative assessment, giving a quick quiz on the material covered is still a common class activity.  For a quiz to be an effective formative assessment, stick with a small number of questions that can be answered quickly.  Rather than application, focus questions more on comprehension of the material. 

If you choose to award points for the quiz, keep it relatively small and communicate that to the students.  Ideally, a quiz is a means of finding out what the students know, not a tool to stress them out.

Lastly, make sure that you can grade the quiz quickly — as the class is walking out the door or transitioning to another activity.  Then, use the results (“Boy, nearly everyone missed question #3.”) to adjust your instruction tomorrow. A quiz that takes days to grade loses value as a formative assessment.

7. The Whiteboard

Provide students with a whiteboard and dry-erase marker for seamless and streamlined formative assessment.  

A class set of whiteboards and markers is an investment (tip: velcro the marker to the desk or whiteboard). Yet, it is one of the quickest and easiest types of formative assessment.  

It’s been a near certainty in my career that a class set of whiteboards is tucked away in the back of a storage room.  

Ask a question and have students write their answers on the board.  When ready, everyone holds up their whiteboard.  You can instantly see how many students are on track or are struggling with the question.  It takes away the stress from students having to answer out loud (unlike equity sticks and discussions) as well as the stress of any points attached (unlike quizzes).

8. Classroom Polls

A higher-tech version of the whiteboard, classroom polls have several advantages.  They give you information quickly (like the whiteboard) but with the bonus of providing you with a record and letting students utilize technology.  Additionally, everyone can view class trends and how many students gave a particular answer.  

One limitation: polls work best for multiple-choice questions although some platforms do allow for open-ended questions.  If you choose an open-ended question, keep it to a one-word answer to keep things moving quickly and to best spot trends.  (The main cause of X was… or One word to describe X is…)

There are a variety of platforms that will support these types of polls.  Kahoot is probably the most popular but other, more sophisticated platforms like Poll Everywhere (they have a free educator account that can be used but the downside is that only 25 students can be polled simultaneously), Slido, and Pear Deck are also excellent options.  Be aware that the primary use of Slido and Pear Deck is not to poll but to create interaction within slideshow presentations.  This goes beyond a simple poll or use of a whiteboard but it can be used to increase interaction in your lectures.

9. Emoji assessment

We were initially on the fence about emoji-themed formative assessment for middle and high school students until we saw how into it they got.  For example, students answer a variation of the question “My understanding of today’s lesson is…” by circling either a happy face, neutral face, or frowning face. 

Emoji assessments are quick and easy; students simply select the emoji that corresponds to their comprehension level.  Students are quite candid when all they have to do is identify the image that corresponds with their understanding of the concept. 

This self-assessment can be done as an alternative to an exit ticket or used throughout instruction.  One option is to laminate a class set of cards to keep on desks (a taped envelope to the desk that contains the cards works well here).  

They then pull out whichever card best describes their understanding of the concept and you can use that to provide help as they are individually working. This provides a nice way for you to know who to help without having a barrage of hands and voices vying for your attention. 

10. Self-assessment

The use of a self-assessment can be a powerful tool for developing metacognition as students reflect on their own understanding and knowledge acquisition.  Self-assessment requires that students analyze their progress.  They must consider where they are in the learning process and what it will take to move forward.  

The benefit of self-assessment is that it creates agency and ownership in the student.  The student is not passively receiving feedback from the teacher but instead actively engaging in assessing their work and understanding of the curriculum.

Brad has taught history at the middle and high school levels for 19 years, almost exclusively in American public schools.  He has a master’s in educational technology and is passionate about elevating the status of professional educators.