8 Best Practices for Formative Assessment Using Embedded Atomic Assessments
Atomic Assessments is a versatile assessment software that helps educators and instructors provide more interactive and focused learning experiences for students. Like the quizzes and assignments native to different Learning Management Systems, Atomic Assessments can be set up as standalone items in a module or section.
But what if an instructor wants to have small formative assessments regularly spaced throughout a module? The structure suddenly becomes inflated with almost as many assignment pages as there are content pages. Even though the assessments themselves are small, students become overwhelmed, and instructors need help to keep everything organized.
Using embedded Atomic Assessments is a great way to provide small formative check-ins while keeping the course focused and organized. We’ve collected some best practices and helpful tips to help instructors set up embedded formative assessments as well as write good formative assessments in Atomic Assessments. Our examples below will show you how the assessments appear in Canvas, however we can work in any LMS.
Tip 1: Name the formative assessment to match the page it’s on. This page is Colonial America, so the assessment is called Practice: Colonial America. This helps both students and instructors keep track of what content the formative assessment is attached to.
Tip 2: Don’t put all items on a single page inside the assessment. If students already have to scroll some to read the page content, you don’t want them to have to scroll more to take the assessment. In settings, scroll down to General Settings and make sure the setting for Show all items on a single page is turned off.
Tip 3: Don’t put too many questions in your formative assessments. You should have enough items to cover all the main points of the content, but if there are too many, you may need to consider splitting the content into multiple pages so that it’s easier for students to digest.
Tip 4: Make sure that a formative assessment embedded on a specific page can be answered using just the content on that page. If you want to have a formative assessment that covers multiple pages of content, consider including it as a standalone assignment and make it clear to students that it covers multiple sections of content.
Tip 5: Use headers, learning objectives, or other structures to help students know what they should be focusing on as they read the page. Should they be comparing and contrasting two different ideas or becoming familiar with key terms and definitions? This page has learning objectives listed at the top, and each of the tabs has a header so students can easily see the main ideas and sections.
Tip 6: Use feedback to help students understand how well they’ve learned the content. You can use the Check Answer button, the after-completion Review, or both to show students feedback. If you are using just the Review, consider showing students how to access it after completing an assignment.
Check Answer button: To turn on the Check Answer button for individual items, use the Check Answer button checkbox in More Options. You can also set the number of attempts. If you set the attempts to zero, students will have unlimited attempts.
If you want to set the Check Answer settings at the assignment level, you can do so in the assignment settings under Question Settings.
To make sure students have access to review their responses, make sure Allow student review in the General Settings is turned on.
Tip 7: Use a variety of question types in your formative assessments. Atomic Assessments has numerous types of question formats that can be customized in even more ways. Using interactive question types can help students stay engaged with the content and expand their thinking about the content.
Tip 8: Formative questions don’t always have to have a correct answer. If you want to ask a formative question that does not have a single correct answer or does not have a correct answer at all, you can set it up using either of the essay question types.
After writing the question stem, you can set the Maximum score if attempted so that students receive points for completing the question. You can review responses afterward to check for appropriateness and relevance and adjust scores if needed.
We’d love to hear from you about the formative assessments you build with Atomic Assessments! Let us know!
