Informal Assessment Strategies That Tell You What Students Actually Know

Formal assessments — tests, quizzes, major projects — answer one question: what did students demonstrate on this particular day at this particular time? They are useful for grading and for measuring endpoint performance, but they have significant limits as instructional tools. By the time you grade a test and see that a third of your class missed the same three questions, you've already moved on.

Informal assessment — checking for understanding during and after instruction, using that information to adjust teaching before students fall further behind — is what allows you to intervene while there's still time. It is the most direct connection between assessment and instruction.

Exit Tickets (Done Well)

The exit ticket is the most common informal assessment tool, and one of the most commonly misused. An exit ticket that asks "what did you learn today?" tells you almost nothing about student understanding — it produces reflections that range from accurate to aspirational with no way to distinguish between them.

An effective exit ticket gives you specific information about whether students can do the thing you taught. After a math lesson, ask students to solve one problem similar to the ones practiced. After a reading lesson, ask students to identify one example of the literary element from a short passage. After a science lesson, ask students to explain one concept in their own words.

Three categories of exit ticket responses tell you everything: students who have it, students who almost have it, students who don't have it yet. You can see which students are in each category and plan your next instruction accordingly.

Review exit tickets before your next class period, not after. The whole point is to inform your next lesson.

Show Me Boards

Individual whiteboards, hand-held dry-erase boards, or laminated paper give every student a surface where they can write a response and hold it up simultaneously. This is one of the fastest informal assessments available because you get a snapshot of the whole class at once.

Ask students to write an answer, then hold up on a count of three. Scan the room. You can see immediately whether the class is clustered around the right answer, distributed across different answers, or showing a common misconception.

Show me boards work well for math computation, vocabulary definitions, true/false responses, and any question with a short, clear answer. They don't work well for nuanced or open-ended questions where variation is expected.

Cold Call Sampling

Calling on students who haven't volunteered gives you a more accurate picture of class understanding than waiting for volunteers. Volunteers tend to be students who already understand — they're confirming understanding, not revealing gaps.

Cold calling can feel punitive if students haven't been prepared for it. Set the norm explicitly: in this class, I'll call on people randomly because it helps me understand what the class as a whole understands, not because you're on the spot. Following wrong answers with curiosity rather than correction also reduces the anxiety that makes random calling feel like a trap.

Pair cold calling with think time and writing. After posing a question, give students thirty seconds to write a response, then cold call. Students who have written something are far less likely to say "I don't know" because they have a response to share. The writing also gives you a record of what they produced before social pressure influenced their response.

Observation Checklists

During independent work, a brief checklist of target behaviors or skills lets you systematically check in on a specific subset of students rather than roaming without focus. Your checklist has the names of the five or six students you want to check on that day and the specific thing you're looking for — whether they're applying the strategy correctly, whether their work shows a common misconception, whether they're able to start without prompting.

This systematic sampling across a week or two gives you data on every student that would be impossible to collect through whole-class instruction.

Hinge Questions

A hinge question is a carefully designed question where different wrong answers reveal different misconceptions. Rather than asking "do you understand?" (binary, uninformative) or a generic comprehension question, a hinge question is designed so that the pattern of wrong answers tells you specifically what needs reteaching and to whom.

In a fractions lesson: which fraction is larger, 3/4 or 3/7? Students who choose 3/7 have a specific misconception (larger denominator means larger fraction) that requires a specific reteaching approach. Students who choose 3/4 correctly might or might not understand why — a follow-up "explain your reasoning" distinguishes between genuine understanding and lucky guessing.

Your Next Step

Review your exit tickets from the last week — or plan your first one for tomorrow. Identify one specific, concrete question that tells you whether students can apply what was taught. After students complete it, sort the papers into three piles: got it, almost, not yet. Use those three piles to decide what happens at the start of the next class. That's the complete informal assessment cycle.