Resources for doing formative assessment in the classroom

close up of teacher in front of first row of students

Formative assessment is a process in classrooms for teachers and students to enhance learning while the learning is occurring. It is an ongoing process in which teachers engage in multiple cycles of eliciting students’ ideas, noticing the substance of students’ thinking, interpreting to make sense of students’ ideas, and acting to guide and support learning. When we use a well designed formative assessment in our classroom, it can reveal what our students are thinking about chemistry in rich and unexpected ways. 

Linked in the menu are formative assessment tools that have been designed, tested, and studied by the ACCT Team (indicated by yellow stars) and formative assessment tools that have been developed by teachers who completed the ACCT professional development program. We can use these formative assessments in our classrooms to help foster our students’ chemical thinking. Each formative assessment is aligned with one of the eleven questions of chemical thinking shown in the infographic below. Read more about ACCT formative assessments on our ChemEd X blog.

  1. What types of matter are there?
  2. What cues are used to differentiate matter types?
  3. What properties of matter types emerge?
  4. How does structure influence reactivity?
  5. What drives chemical change?
  6. What determines the outcomes of chemical changes?
  7. What interaction patterns are established?
  8. What affects chemical change?
  9. How can chemical changes be controlled?
  10. How can the effects be controlled?
  11. What are the effects of using and producing different matter types?