Instruction
Assessment
Formative
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You can add video as a stand-alone content item and attach questions. Our Partner users can also attach questions at specific times in the video or add a video directly into any question!
You can add videos between other items on your formative. Click on the + icon in between questions or content you've already created, and select from the menu that appears.
*Note: The “Record Video” feature is not compatible with Safari on macOS.
If you are a member of a Partner School or District, you can add a video to any question or content block. You just have to click the blue "+" icon (found in any rich-text field). Then click "Video."
You will have the option to record using your camera, upload from your device, or record and upload a screencast. Check out the following animation to see how it works. Supported file types for video uploads are mp4, mov, webm, 3gpp, 3gpp2, flv, wmv, and mpeg.
You can even leave feedback for students with this feature! Just click the blue plus sign in the feedback chat box!
Partner users can create questions attached to specific times in a video. Students will see the questions pop up when the video reaches the selected time. Students are still able to control the video by playing, pausing, adjusting the time, and moving the video forward or backward.
Note: You can add more than one question at a particular timestamp by clicking the "Add item at X:XX" button, clicking the "+" in the question area, or by duplicating a question.
Students can also record video submissions when using the Free Response question type!
You can add more than one question at a particular timestamp by clicking the "Add item at X:XX" button, clicking the "+" in the question area, or by duplicating a question.
Yes! Students will see and be able to control the video in the same way during Teacher Paced Mode. Each student will be able to control the video on their own screen.
Not a problem! Simply click "Add item at 0:00," and you can add your questions. Students will be able to view them ahead of time by clicking the drop-down arrow next to each question in the right-side column.
Students can respond to your questions by recording themselves using audio and video! This is great for young learners and foreign-language classes. There is a 10-minute limit to recordings, so students will have plenty of time to share their thoughts!
Prompt/ask students to provide a verbal response or explanation!
Prompt/ask students to provide a visual response or explanation!
Score and give feedback to multiple student answers at the same time. This is useful if a particular question is giving multiple students trouble!
If you have a Partner account, you'll see an option to "Draw Feedback" on your students' Show Your Work responses. Click on this button to launch the full-screen canvas.
You can use any of the Show Your Work tools (draw, circle, create a square, draw a line, type, upload an image, use the Math Keyboard, select, erase, and back) to annotate your students' responses. When you click the checkmark, your annotations will be saved as an image that you can instantly send to your student as a feedback message!
Students can directly send feedback to partner teachers on a formative and respond to teacher feedback messages.
Have a little more fun with student feedback!
One of our features to help ensure secure assessment is the Copy / Paste Alert. This alert is designed to show whenever a student uses any copy-and-paste function -- this could include CTRL C/V keyboard short-cuts, or right-clicking the mouse to select copy/paste, etc..
If a student has used these functions, you will see an exclamation mark alert that reads, "This response includes copy & pasted parts."
At this time, Formative shows this alert as a way to make you aware that students used this function. The only question type that will actually show you what was copied and pasted is Short Answer. You can click on the small “i” icon in the alert to view what was copied and pasted into the student response. The alert will not appear if a student copies and pastes a part of their own response: only outside items.
Teacher discretion is required for this alert, so we never auto-grade these responses as incorrect.
It could be helpful to let your students know that you are aware when they use any copy/paste function but that this does not always indicate cheating.
To access the student growth tracker, click on the Tracker tab at the top of your dashboard.
When showing Formatives (at the top left), click on individual student names to view their overall score for each assignment.
Note: Students who have not yet taken a formative will have a blank score in the Tracker.
Select "Standards" to see how students performed against standards tagged in the assignments. To do so, click on "Standards," expand the standards to see them in detail (if you want), and click the student's name.
To calculate scores, we sum up all the points that answers received (=points earned). We then total all points available for those answers (the point value on the questions = points possible) and divide the former by the latter.
For example, let's say a student completes one formative with two questions. Question one is worth five points. Question two is worth ten points. The student gets two points on the first question and six points on the second. Their score for that formative is as follows: (2 + 6)/(5 + 10) = 8/15 = 53%.
When calculating multiple formatives, we consider all questions and basically treat them as if they were one big formative. For example, let's add a formative to our previous example. This formative has one question worth five points, and the student earned four points. This student's overall grade is now as follows: (2 + 6 + 4)/(5 + 10 + 5) = 12/20 = 60%
As a result, the system will weigh a formative or question with more available points more heavily in the overall score.
NOTE: If a student did not submit an assignment, unanswered questions do not count toward possible points. When students submit an assignment with an unanswered question, their work will count towards the total possible points, thus reducing the overall score. Read about how to force-submit a formative here.
If at a later time, a teacher adds a new question that students do not answer, the tracker will not count the points for that question in their score.
From the Tracker page, you can select the Export button located in the top right corner.
Once you select that button, a pop-up screen will appear for you to choose the content you’d like to export. You can export as a CSV/spreadsheet or as a Google Sheet. You can also export all rows or only the rows you have expanded.
When selecting Download as CSV/Spreadsheet, it will download directly to your computer.
If you select Google Sheets, the platform will direct you to choose the email associated with your account. You will then receive a prompt to your Google Sheets page.
After creating a question, place your cursor over the following "Tag Standards" area, and tag your question to standards for student growth tracking! Use keywords in the dropdown menu to results with standards in their descriptions!
You can also tag a single question with multiple standards. Want us to add another standards set(s)? Please have the admin on your account reach out and let us know what standard sets(s) you would like us to add!
Rubrics are powerful tools: they provide scoring guidelines for evaluating student work, and they offer clear teaching directives and criteria for students. You can customize them in your formatives! Add a rubric to an open-ended question type: Show Your Work, Video Response, Audio Response, Free Response, or File Response.
We are thrilled to announce we are one of the first fifteen add-on apps through the new Google Classroom integration as mentioned in Google's recent Anywhere School Event!
Effortlessly access Formative’s power from your Google Classroom account! You will be able to create, edit, preview, and assign any Formative without needing to navigate back and forth between the two platforms.
This partnership will make it easier for educators and students to get real-time, actionable data. And don't worry: we'll be here to help you at every step of the way!
Wishing you a great summer!
The Formative Team
Collaborating is a feature that allows you to do more than make and share formative copies with other teachers. As a Partner-school user, you can add collaborators to your formative! You can grant two levels of access to a collaborator.
If you or your collaborator make changes to a formative, edits will appear immediately on your collaborators' screens. If they have already assigned the formative to a class, then the changes may affect their data. (for example, if you delete or add answer-key options).
Wondering if collaborating is the right option? Then check out how to share a formative or how to publish it to the public library or your team/school's private library.
TThere are two ways to give collaborating permissions on a formative to others:
If you have a large amount of collaborators that you want to add, we recommend using the direct link! (See the following for instructions on both ways.
Return to the same "Share" menu, click "edit" next to the collaborator's name, and change the level of access by choosing from the dropdown menu. Remove the collaborator entirely by clicking on the "X" next to their name.
Any collaborator that has "Edit & Assign" level of access can share the direct link at the bottom of the "share" modal with other teachers from the organization.
Teachers on your team who receive the direct link will be automatically added to the formative as collaborators; they can assign the formative only to their students.
*Note: collaborating is a feature for our Partner teams and schools. Click here to find out more!
Publish any of your formatives to your team, school, or district's private library as a Common Assessment. When a colleague grabs this assessment from the library, they won't be able to edit the content in any way: they will only be able to assign it. You can be sure every class is taking the same version of the assessment.
Common Assessments will be labeled as such in your team, school, or district's private library. The library's filters allow searching for only Common Assessments as well. Anyone with access to the private library can grab a live copy of the common assessment and then assign it to their students.
Anyone with an Edit & Assign level of access to the common assessment can also send teachers within the organization a direct link to the common assessment. If teachers receive the direct link, they can assign the common assessment to their students.
At the bottom of the screen, you’ll find the direct link in the "share" modal under the first tab.
Note: Anyone who grabs a Common Assessment from the private library is grabbing a LIVE copy: if the original author changes or updates the Common Assessment, those changes will reflect immediately on the screens of all users with a copy, including students currently taking the Common Assessment.
For school network-managed Chromebooks, Windows, Mac, and iPads, this browser is available as an optional add-on to a Partner Subscription to help keep assessments secure. It prevent students from opening any other apps, tabs, or windows. However, even with this browser-locking technology, it may still be possible for students outside the classroom to use other resources to help them with test questions; students might ask a sibling for assistance or use the internet on a second device.
Single Sign-On (SSO) allows you to use your Google, Microsoft, or Clever profile to authenticate you when logging into Formative. If your school account is tied to one of these providers, we encourage you to use SSO for efficiency.
If you don't use one of those providers, you can create a password for your Formative login. Students and teachers can use either method.
With Formative you can sync rosters with your Student Information System (SIS).
Syncing rosters with your SIS is one way to set up all teacher and student accounts and to automatically place all students and teachers into their classes.
In order to set up a OneRoster connection, you will need an SIS or other software system component that allows access to rosters using OneRoster 1.1 API or CSV files. Aeries, ClassLink, PowerSchool Unified, and Infinite Campus are some examples of software that support OneRoster exports using the API integration method.
Some of our customers do not have any system that supports OneRoster. In this case, some have adopted ClassLink, which can be used to add OneRoster support to a variety of SIS systems (read more about that here). A few others have implemented a custom software solution on their end to generate OneRoster files and then upload them to an SFTP server.
Once you have identified a way to provide us with OneRoster data, you will have to consult its documentation (assuming it is not a custom solution) to determine how to set up a OneRoster export and provide us with the necessary information to access it.
For OneRoster API integrations, you are given a OneRoster Base URL, Consumer Key, and Consumer Secret.
Blackbaud users: your base URL is based on your Blackbaud access URL. If your Blackbaud domain name is yourschool.myschoolapp.com, then your Base URL will be https://yourschool.myschoolapp.com/ims/oneroster/v1p1
You can encrypt the consumer secret into a secure sharing URL using https://dead-drop.me. Send the Base URL, Consumer Key, and Consumer Secret to your implementation specialist.
Note: if you are using ClassLink, you can instruct members to share roster data with us instead of sending us the credentials. Check out this article for more details.
If your system does not support OneRoster API integration but exports CSV files that must be added to a ZIP file and uploaded to an SFTP site, please contact us to set up an SFTP account you can use to upload the file.
We only need these files for rostering from zipped CSV files:
You can optionally provide courses.csv.
In addition to the OneRoster access information, we will want to know which organizations (schools, districts, departments, etc.) you wish to import to help us validate the data we receive; this information also helps avoid importing the wrong users. We will want to know the NCES ID (or other government ID, if available) of each school and district, too, so we can avoid data duplication.
Since your organization will have some degree of control over the users that OneRoster imports, we restrict the imported users to a list of emails and email address domains that we can confirm you control. We will need to know all the email domains that your district owns to enable the import of those users via OneRoster. If you have a subset of users outside your controlled email domain (contractors, for example), we can also accommodate a small number of specific, individual email addresses.
After doing all of the above, be prepared to provide us with the following information if you haven't already done so:
To access the student growth tracker, click on the Tracker tab at the top of your dashboard.
When showing Formatives (at the top left), click on individual student names to view their overall score for each assignment.
Note: Students who have not yet taken a formative will have a blank score in the Tracker.
Select "Standards" to see how students performed against standards tagged in the assignments. To do so, click on "Standards," expand the standards to see them in detail (if you want), and click the student's name.
To calculate scores, we sum up all the points that answers received (=points earned). We then total all points available for those answers (the point value on the questions = points possible) and divide the former by the latter.
For example, let's say a student completes one formative with two questions. Question one is worth five points. Question two is worth ten points. The student gets two points on the first question and six points on the second. Their score for that formative is as follows: (2 + 6)/(5 + 10) = 8/15 = 53%.
When calculating multiple formatives, we consider all questions and basically treat them as if they were one big formative. For example, let's add a formative to our previous example. This formative has one question worth five points, and the student earned four points. This student's overall grade is now as follows: (2 + 6 + 4)/(5 + 10 + 5) = 12/20 = 60%
As a result, the system will weigh a formative or question with more available points more heavily in the overall score.
NOTE: If a student did not submit an assignment, unanswered questions do not count toward possible points. When students submit an assignment with an unanswered question, their work will count towards the total possible points, thus reducing the overall score. Read about how to force-submit a formative here.
If at a later time, a teacher adds a new question that students do not answer, the tracker will not count the points for that question in their score.
From the Tracker page, you can select the Export button located in the top right corner.
Once you select that button, a pop-up screen will appear for you to choose the content you’d like to export. You can export as a CSV/spreadsheet or as a Google Sheet. You can also export all rows or only the rows you have expanded.
When selecting Download as CSV/Spreadsheet, it will download directly to your computer.
If you select Google Sheets, the platform will direct you to choose the email associated with your account. You will then receive a prompt to your Google Sheets page.
District supervisors and directors can access the data to allow for collaboration and reflection with administrators and specialists. Once published, all are updatable at any time, and any changes will update scores and tracking for students.
Formative assessment is the true pulse of rich instruction. This phenomenal platform allows us to provide instant feedback to students while simultaneously adapting to an ever-changing virtual landscape.
It is probably one of the very best programs I have ever come across in education, and I’ve been here for 31 years...The customer support is outstanding!
Fingers crossed that SCEC admin will buy into the full subscription. What would life be without Formative in the classroom? Thank you for creating such an app. It is a teacher's online dream for assessments!