Here are few formative assessments that I've seen have high impact. Some of them allow for immediate instructional pivots, some inform instruction for tomorrow or later.
1. Justin, trying to figure out why classroom discussions were lagging in his senior class, created a single multiple choice question that asked "what's the main idea" of a short article students had just read in class. All of the answer choices were quotations from the article. How many students were able to pick the correct quotation? 50%. Yikes. Maybe the discussion was lagging because students didn't even know what the articles under discussion were saying! He was able to pivot immediately to make sure students understood this article, and he pivoted in the long term to develop students' reading skills.
2. Erin was helping develop students' abilities to infer subtle things in a fiction text (in this instance, what's the quality of the relationship between two characters) from choice of detail. After some preliminary work, she asked students to read a one-page section and write on individual whiteboards a one-word characterization of the relationship. Quickly, she glances around the room, and develops a good picture of how widely the students varied. If students were pretty close, she'd move on in the lesson; if students' answers were "all over the place," she would know that she needs to circle back so students can more reliably move from detail to characterization.
3. Mike has designed 3 rhetorical analysis tasks for three different types of text (a modern TV commercial, an Abigail Adams letter, and Martin Luther King Speech) and assigns a single score to each essay (following Marzano's 1-4 scale). At the end of the third rhetorical analysis task, he scans the grades of each student, looking for proficiency at 3. He finds that 7 students are not easily earning 3s. So, he plans a lesson for later this week when he'll meet with those 7 students one-on-one to diagnose the difficulty and get them over the hump while the other students are doing a close reading task that, in past years, he's given as homework.
4. Cherise has two student-led discussions going at the same time in her classroom. She floats between the groups, taking running records on her tablet. She's working hard not to listen to the content of the discussion, but just for the ways that the conversation moves between students. Are students summarizing previous students' comments before moving on? Are they disagreeing in a way that builds rather than ends conversation? Are the student discussion leaders asking follow up questions? At the end of the lesson, Cherise reports out to the class, praising studnets' efforts and accomplishments. She doesn't say "good job," but "I heard Jeremy do a nice job acknowledging alternative viewpoints. I heard Cynthia summarizing and connecting from Tasha's point to her own." The italicized words were the key goals of the discussion.
5. Last year I was working with students to be build their knowledge of sentence parts, both for prose variety and for sentence punctuation. I was teaching, specifically, how independent clauses and dependent clauses come together as complex or compound sentences (etc.). Sometimes I would start a class with a one-sentence quiz. I would say something like "write a D-I sentence, using the clause 'the zombies ate my dog's brain' somewhere in the sentence." At the time we were doing 10 minutes of independent reading per day. During that 10 minutes, I was quickly able to sort the 26 one-sentences quizzes into "yes" and "no" piles and to squat down alongside each student who made a mistake and talk them through the answer immediately. Three correct answers in a row would make me "graduate" a student from opening quizzes.
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