Formative assessment: A guide for international schools

TL;DR

You already do formative assessment every day. The quick question, the show of hands, the slip of paper on the way out the door: that's all it is. This guide is for teachers and coordinators in IB, Cambridge and Pearson schools who want it laid out plainly. We'll cover what formative assessment is, why it works, the main types and strategies, and how to run it on-screen without drowning in marking. It's the home base for our wider set of guides, so each section links you to the deeper ones when you need them.

Formative assessment is the everyday, low-stakes way of checking how well students understand something while they're still learning it, using things like questions, exit tickets, quizzes and peer feedback, so you can adjust your teaching before the final, graded test.

What is formative assessment?

Formative assessment is any check you do while students are still learning, so you can use what you find straight away. It's not about putting a grade in the book. It's about deciding what to do next, for you and for the student.

Three things make it formative. It happens all the time, as part of normal lessons. It's low-stakes, so students will actually show you what they don't understand. And it goes somewhere: you look at what students did, and you change something. In IB language, this is the day-to-day work that sits under internal assessment (IA) and on-screen assessment. It's how students get ready for the moments that count.

Here's the simplest version. You ask a question halfway through a lesson. Half the class gets it wrong. So you stop, explain it again, and check once more before you move on. That whole thing is formative assessment, and it took ninety seconds.

The problem is usually time. You can't mark thirty answers by hand in the middle of a lesson. That's where doing it on-screen helps. AssessPrep lets you set quick checks with 10+ question types and get the results instantly, on the same platform you'd use for proper exams. If you want to build a quick formative check, it's a few minutes, not your whole evening.

Why formative assessment matters in international schools

Formative assessment matters because feedback while students are still learning is one of the strongest tools a teacher has. The research is clear. In John Hattie's Visible Learning research, feedback scores 0.73, nearly double the 0.40 that counts as a normal year's progress. Black and Wiliam found formative work adds between 0.4 and 0.7. Few teaching habits have evidence this strong.

It matters even more in an international school. Your students come and go from all over, and they're rarely at the same level. A student who arrived in October from another system might have gaps that a mid-unit test would only reveal far too late. Quick, low-stakes checks catch those gaps early, while you can still do something about them.

The tricky bit is spotting the pattern across the whole class fast enough to act on it. When checks run on-screen, assessment analytics show you straight away which idea the class missed, while the lesson is still going, not days later once you've worked through the pile.

Formative vs summative assessment

The difference is what it's for, not what it looks like. Formative assessment helps learning as it happens. Summative assessment measures learning once a unit or course is finished. The exact same quiz can be either one. It depends on what you do with the result.

That's the short version. We go into it properly in our formative vs summative guide (planned, link on publish), and for the US-district take on interim and benchmark tests, see common formative vs interim vs benchmark assessments. The main thing: you need both, and running them in one place keeps the data tidy.

Types of formative assessment

The main types of formative assessment are all quick ways to see what students are actually thinking. Here are the ones worth knowing, and what each one is good for.

• Questioning and cold-calling. Ask named students, not just the keen hands, so you hear from the whole room.

• Exit tickets. One question at the end of the lesson that tells you if the point landed before students walk out.

• Hinge questions. Ask one well-chosen question at the moment a lesson turns. If most get it right, you move on. If they don't, you go over it again right then.

• Low-stakes quizzes. Short, ungraded practice that helps things stick and shows you what's missing.

• Self-assessment. Students mark their own work against the success criteria, so they learn what good actually looks like.

• Peer assessment. Students give each other specific feedback against the criteria, which helps them understand it better too.

• Observation. Watch how students work during a task or discussion, using a simple checklist. It catches things a written answer never shows, like how a student talks through a problem or works in a group.

• Polls and mini-whiteboards. Whole-class answers you can read in seconds and react to on the spot.

The thing that stops teachers doing these is workload. A question bank plus AI authoring lets you put a check together in minutes, and auto-marked checks come back the second students hit submit. So the type you pick isn't limited by how much marking you can stomach.

Formative assessment strategies and examples

A strategy is just the how: the routine that turns a check into something useful. A few that work in any subject:

Show me, then reteach. Ask a hinge question, look at the answers, and either move on or go over it again. You're deciding based on what students actually showed you, not a hunch.

Two stars and a wish. Students give a partner two things that worked and one to improve, against the criteria. It makes them think hard about what good looks like.

Retrieval starters. Begin the lesson with three quick questions on last week's work. You get a free check, and students get useful practice.

Live misconception hunt. Run a quick on-screen poll, put the most common wrong answer up on the board, and get the class to argue about it.

Do these on-screen and each one comes back with instant class data instead of a stack to mark. For the full list, see our 20 formative assessment examples for the digital classroom (planned, link on publish), and our piece on feedback for feedforward for how to make feedback actually change the next piece of work.

Start your 30-day free trial. Run formative checks and proper exams from one platform, built for IB, Cambridge and Pearson schools, with AI grading and instant class results. Start your free trial →

How to run formative assessment digitally at scale

To run formative assessment on-screen, you move the checks online, let them mark themselves, and use the results to spot confusion as it happens. That's the change that makes regular checking possible when you've got a full timetable.

On paper, every check you set is something you have to mark that night. Thirty exit slips is thirty things to read before tomorrow, so most teachers quietly do it less often. Alternatively, the teachers can use paper mode capabilities provided within AssessPrep. 

However, on-screen, the marking is done the moment students submit. You open the class view and see that, say, 11 out of 28 missed the same step. So you go over that one step at the start of the next lesson, instead of finding out in the unit test.

Two things make this work in practice:

• Question types that mark themselves. Multiple choice, fill-in-the-blanks and true/false are graded the instant a student submits, so a whole-class check costs you no marking time at all.

• AI that writes the questions. Generate questions for your curriculum, by subject and question type, in seconds, instead of writing every check from scratch the night before.

This is the everyday job a purpose-built platform does well. AssessPrep is used in 800+ schools across 85+ countries, with over 5 million student submissions and more than 1 million teacher hours saved, most of it on exactly this kind of repetitive marking. When you can deliver assessments online and read the results straight away, formative assessment stops being the thing you drop when the term gets busy.

Formative assessment in IB, Cambridge & Pearson classrooms

Formative assessment looks a little different in each curriculum, because each one judges students differently. The idea is the same; only the framing changes.

In IB MYP, marking is criterion-based, so your checks should practise the criteria and build eAssessment readiness. Students need to know what a strong answer looks like against each strand before it counts. In IB DP, formative work points toward the internal assessment and final papers: low-stakes practice at exam-style thinking, marked against the IB command terms. For Cambridge IGCSE and A-Level, your checks track progress against the assessment objectives before the big exams. For Pearson Edexcel (including IAL and BTEC), it's the same idea across the units.

What sets an international tool apart is content that already matches your syllabus. AssessPrep comes with ready-made question banks for every curriculum, with 40,000+ questions for IB DP alone and over 60,000 across IB, Cambridge and Pearson, so a check is curriculum-aligned from the start. For setup by curriculum, see the IB MYP platform and IB DP platform pages, and our guide to mastering IB MYP assessments.

Conclusion

Formative assessment isn't one more thing to add to your plate. It's the everyday habit that makes everything else work: the questions, the exit tickets, the quick checks that tell you whether to move on. The evidence behind it is strong, and in an international school full of students at different levels, the case is even stronger. The only real problem is workload, and that's the bit technology actually fixes. Move the checks on-screen, let them mark themselves, and read the class as you go. Start small, keep it regular, and follow the links in this guide when you want to go deeper.

Key Takeaways

• Formative assessment happens during learning and is usually low-stakes and ungraded. Its job is to tell you what to do next, not to record a grade.

• Feedback and formative checks are among the most powerful, best-proven things teachers do,  feedback scores 0.73 in Hattie's research, and Black & Wiliam found formative work adds between 0.4 and 0.7.

• The main types (questioning, exit tickets, hinge questions, low-stakes quizzes, self- and peer assessment) all show you what students are thinking, fast.

• Doing checks on-screen takes away the marking pile and shows you confusion in real time, so you can actually keep it up.

• In IB, Cambridge and Pearson classrooms, everyday checks build readiness for criterion-based marking, IA and the final papers.