Formative Assessment Ideas With Quiz Games

A formative assessment is a check you do while students are still learning, so you can change what happens next. That last part is the one people skip. Plenty of quizzes get played, scored and forgotten. The score goes nowhere, and the next lesson is the one that was planned three weeks ago.

Quiz games are good at the first half of the job, because every student answers every question and the answers arrive in seconds. This post is about the second half: six ways to use a short quiz game so that what you learn changes what you teach tomorrow. They work with any tool, and the examples show how they look in Kwizzy.

The rule that makes a quiz formative

Decide, before you run it, what you will do with each possible result. If you cannot finish the sentence "If most of the class gets this wrong, the next step is ___", the quiz is a game, not an assessment. It is fine to run a game just for fun. It just should not be reported to yourself as data.

A practical version: write down one decision per quiz. "Fewer than two thirds right on question 3 means a worked example tomorrow. More than that means moving on." That one line is the difference between checking and collecting.

Two habits protect the quality of what you learn. First, keep the quiz low stakes and say so. Students who are afraid of a bad score will guess, copy or guess to look sure, and then you are measuring nerves. Second, keep it short. Five questions on one idea tell you more than twenty on everything, and you will actually read the results.

Idea 1: The pre-check before a new unit

Before you teach a unit, run six to eight questions on the skills the unit assumes. If you are starting a lesson on percent change, ask about fractions, decimals and simple percentages first. If you are about to teach the water cycle, ask what students think they know about evaporation.

This is the quiz where wrong answers are most useful, because they show you the misconceptions students arrive with. Weather and Climate is a starting point for an earth science unit, but you will learn more if you swap in two or three questions about the exact ideas you plan to build on. Tell students it does not count, and run it as a game so they are willing to guess.

Do not use a pre-check to prove students know nothing. A pre-check that is too hard gives you a wall of wrong answers and no information about where the gaps start. Include a couple of easy questions so you can see where understanding begins.

Idea 2: The mid-lesson stop

Halfway through a lesson, pause and ask two or three questions on what you just taught. Students answer on phones, and you look at the result before deciding whether to go on.

The key is that the questions test the idea, not recall of a sentence you just said. If you taught that plants make sugar from light, water and carbon dioxide, do not ask "What do plants make?" Ask something that needs the idea: "A plant is kept in a dark cupboard for a week. Which change would you expect?" The library quiz Plants and Photosynthesis has questions at the recall level, which suit a quick check, and you can use them as a base for these application-level ones.

If the room splits between two answers, that is useful. Ask a student from each side to explain, then re-vote with a second question. In a live game you get the reveal at the end of each question, so use it as a hinge: show the right answer, then say "Turn to your neighbor and tell them why the other one is tempting."

Idea 3: The exit ticket

At the end of class, three questions. It takes five minutes and gives you the cleanest read on whether a lesson worked, because it comes straight after the teaching. There is a full guide in exit ticket ideas with quizzes; the short version is to ask one question on the main idea, one on a common mistake, and one that asks students to apply it.

For formative use, read the results that evening or before first period, and write the one-line decision beside it. That takes two minutes. If you do it rarely, the exit ticket becomes a ritual.

Idea 4: Homework as a private check

A live game is public. Everyone sees the leaderboard and everyone sees who hesitated. For students who do not want to be seen guessing, a homework quiz is gentler. You set a quiz with a deadline, students open the link, enter a nickname and answer on their own time, and they see whether each answer was right straight after.

This is useful when you want an honest read on every student, including those who stay quiet in class. See how to assign a quiz as homework for the steps. You see each nickname's score. If you are on a paid plan, you also get a breakdown for each question; on the free plan you can still tell which students struggled and ask them to stay a moment after class.

One limit: homework quizzes are not timed, and students can take them with a book open. That is fine for a formative check whose purpose is learning, and less fine if you want to know what they can do unaided. Say which one you want when you set it.

Idea 5: The two-round game

Run a short live game, stop, teach for five minutes on whatever went worst, then run it again with different questions on the same ideas. The second round shows you whether the reteaching worked.

This is the most direct way to close the loop, and students tend to like it because they can see the improvement. For a grammar unit, you might play eight questions from Grammar, Parts of Speech and Punctuation, reteach the two question types that went worst, then play four fresh questions on those same types.

The risk is that the second round measures memory of the answers, not understanding. Avoid it by changing the questions so that the same idea appears in a new context, and not by reshuffling the old ones. If you reuse a question, change the numbers or the example.

Idea 6: Teams that explain

Team play turns a formative check into a conversation. Students discuss each question before they answer, and you can walk the room and listen. What you hear tells you more than the score does: which misconception is spreading, which student is explaining well, and who is quiet.

In a live game with teams, a team's score is the average of its members, so one strong student cannot carry everyone. Walk the room during the discussion and write down two phrases you hear. A student saying the percent was taken from the new number instead of the old one is a gift: it names the misunderstanding in a student's own words. There is more on this in team quiz games for the classroom.

Reading the results without drowning in them

You do not need every number. After a short quiz, look for three things.

• A question most of the class missed. That is a teaching problem, not a student problem, until you know otherwise. Check the question first: is it clear, and does it test what you taught?
• A wrong answer many students chose. One popular wrong answer means a shared misconception. Write the fix before you write anything else.
• Individual students who missed most of it. These are the ones to check in with. A short conversation will usually tell you more than another quiz.

If you have the paid report, it shows how each question went across the class and is the quickest way to find the first two. Read how to read your live quiz game report for what each part tells you. Without it, the live reveal gives you a rough signal in the moment, and a quick show of hands after each answer fills in the rest.

One thing to avoid: do not grade a formative quiz. The moment it counts, students stop taking risks. If you need to record something, record what you decided to do, not a mark.

Next steps

Pick one idea and run it this week, and write the decision line before you start. A free teacher account lets you try live games and homework with the library quizzes, which is enough to practise the habit. When you are ready to write questions that match your own unit exactly, and to see how each question went across the class, take a look at pricing to see what the paid plans add.