Formative assessment is a powerful way to guide student learning, helping educators see where their students are and offer the support they need to grow. Kialo Edu offers a dynamic and interactive way to assess student understanding — and it’s completely free!
Formative assessment is an ongoing process of evaluating student understanding that helps educators and students work together to enhance learning outcomes. It typically involves low-stakes, integrated activities to give educators real-time insights into student learning.
Here are a few simple but effective formative assessment activities using Kialo discussions to gauge student understanding and keep them engaged!
1. Kialo discussions to open or close a class
Educators can integrate discussions into the start or end of their classes as a formative assessment tool, making discussions a routine part of a teaching practice.
Discussions are a fantastic tool to gather clear, real-time insights into student knowledge and understanding. At the start of a class, educators can use a discussion to discern students’ pre-existing knowledge on a topic, recap learning from the previous class, or check students’ understanding of pre-class readings in a flipped context.
At the end of a class, a quick discussion can effectively measure students’ grasp of the class content, allowing educators to spot areas of confusion before assigning additional homework. In addition, a discussion at the end of a class can check whether students connected the day’s learning to previous lessons and units.
2. Kialo discussions at midway and end points in your course
Discussions offer a flexible approach to formative assessment where educators can differentiate its process and thus subsequent assessments. In a Kialo discussion, educators can split a class into groups using Small Group Mode for each group to work from their own copy of the discussion. You can design groups based on your differentiation needs, then customize each group’s copy of the discussion to best support your students.
For students who find traditional writing tasks more challenging, discussions offer an alternative way to demonstrate learning. By holding discussions at midway points in your course, you can see how students connect curricular content across units, and identify areas for reinforcement before summative assessments.
To make contribution expectations clear and to track student progress, try using Tasks to assign and direct student work in a Kialo discussion.
This activity is best for building confidence in students by allowing them to reflect, collaborate, and share ideas at their own pace.
When your groups have finished a discussion, ask each student to choose one claim they found surprising, and another claim that they still have questions about. Then, have students pair up to discuss the chosen claims.
By doing so, students can explore uncertainties together in a low-stakes setting before sharing their thoughts and insights with the wider class. This also allows teachers to quickly identify areas where further support is needed.
4. Fill in the gaps discussions for applying knowledge
With this activity, you can see how well students can apply their knowledge on a learning topic. Provide students with a partially developed discussion on the topic you wish to assess, then ask them to fill in the gaps by drawing on both their reasoning and research skills. In the example lesson below, students add their own claims to a discussion analyzing events of the French Revolution, with suggested readings for research.
Should the 1791 French Constitution provide all citizens with the same political power? — kialo-edu.com
This may require students to add entirely new claims where information is missing, or supporting claims and evidence to expand on and reinforce the discussion content. For example, if students are analyzing a Shakespearean play, such as King Lear, they might add sources with relevant quotes, Acts, and Scenes to the claims you’ve already added.
5. Individual discussions to demonstrate knowledge
One of the best things about Kialo discussions is that they reveal students’ thinking processes. This makes it easy for educators to spot gaps in students’ knowledge and give targeted timely feedback right in the discussion itself.
For a knowledge-demonstrating task, have students work to complete a discussion individually to assess their current level of understanding. Then, after providing feedback, allow students to revisit and refine the discussion for homework. This way, students are given the opportunity to improve on their first attempt and develop their knowledge.
6. Peer assessment and review
Prompting students to invite their peers to review their discussions can help foster a reflective learning process. By seeking out the strengths and areas for improvement in their classmates’ work, students enhance their critical thinking skills and deepen their understanding of the content, which they can then apply to their own work.
This process can also help them internalize assessment criteria while opening up opportunities to develop a class culture of collaboration and ongoing feedback. Educators can then review the peer feedback to identify areas where students need extra support or reinforcement.
7. Low-stakes quizzes
Writing their own quiz questions brings its own benefits for students, and it’s also a great way to set up a quick formative assessment. After groups complete a discussion, have them write quiz questions on the content.
Collecting quiz questions from all groups ensures the class benefits from the diverse perspectives that each group brought to the topic. You can then organize and edit them as necessary to prompt more complex, wide-ranging answers before using them as a future quiz.
8. Exit slips closing a discussion
Exit slips are a simple but effective formative assessment tool to quickly gauge student understanding at the end of a lesson. Though their content can vary, exit slips typically involve students jotting down a response to a prompt on a slip of paper (or digital equivalent) to hand in before they leave. Here are some ideas for exit slips after a Kialo discussion.
- Provide sentence stems for reflection. Students might respond to prompts like “One counterargument I need to address better is …” or “The claim I need more support for is …”.
- Use the 3-2-1 technique where students name three claims that they understand well, two claims that they found interesting, and one claim that they feel they still have questions about.
- Provide students a prompt and set a time limit to write a paragraph. As a more detailed submission, you might ask them to state and explain their stance on the discussion thesis backed up with example claims. Or ask them to describe how their experience in the discussion changed or reinforced their understanding of the topic.
We hope this selection will give you some new ideas about integrating Kialo discussions with formative assessment strategies! We’d love to hear what works in your class, so please do get in touch with your ideas at feedback@kialo-edu.com, or on any of our social media platforms.
