What’s New with Formative for the 2023-2024 School Year

Formative
Editorial Team
May 22, 2024
Product Update

We are so excited to help you prepare for back to school. At Formative, supporting teachers and students is core to everything we do, so we have been hard at work to make improvements based on your feedback. And since we've joined forces with Newsela, the leading K-12 instructional content platform, we're excited to team up and support you and your student all school year long. You can learn more about Newsela's acquisition of Formative here.

With our latest product updates for this back-to-school, teachers can expect easier class management, enhanced creation of formatives, even more methods of providing impactful student feedback, and powerful new ways to view actionable real time data.

Enhanced class and formative management

Improvements to class and formative management will provide easier visibility into your students' work. As a teacher you now have a page that shows all formatives that are assigned to a certain class or even look at formative information for a specific student. This is great to quickly understand class or individual student progress on their work in Formative. Additionally, we have made it easier to Bulk close or reopen formatives and transfer ownership of folders or formatives.

Teacher Tip

Ready to start the school year with a quick icebreaker activity for your classes? Remember when you are finished you can easily bulk close the Formative for all of your assigned classes!

Admin Tip

Common assessment settings have been improved to make administration easier by ensuring the desired formative settings are maintained by all teachers giving the assessment. (Coming Soon)
Webinar

What's New With Formative

Get ready to supercharge your knowledge of Formative! Explore our newest class management updates, AI-generation tools, effectively use summary Page tools for optimizing student cognitive retention, and more!

Learn More
Webinar

What's New With Formative

Get ready to supercharge your knowledge of Formative! Explore our newest class management updates, AI-generation tools, effectively use summary Page tools for optimizing student cognitive retention, and more!

Learn More
Webinar

What's New With Formative

Get ready to supercharge your knowledge of Formative! Explore our newest class management updates, AI-generation tools, effectively use summary Page tools for optimizing student cognitive retention, and more!

Learn More

Supercharged ability to create formatives

We love hearing how teachers use Formative to support bell ringers, homework, quick quizzes, lessons, essays, and many more activities in their classes. Creating formatives is quicker and easier than ever by leveraging Formative AI generation to help create questions for a specific topic.  Teachers have told us that this is a huge time saver and they love that they can easily edit anything that is generated to suit their classroom needs. We have also improved partial credit scoring and added unit equivalency support to make auto grading more accurate. 

Our 20 question types provide flexibility to check student understanding in a variety of ways and evaluate higher level thinking while capturing real time data to provide teachers with valuable insights. We have improved several question types. For example match table grid can now allow multiple selections, students can reuse answer choices on categorize questions, and you can enable the option to have math answer choices visible while creating questions. For teachers that love to use flipped instruction or incorporate videos in their class, we have enhanced our time stamped video question so that you can prevent skipping to ensure students complete the experience.

Teacher Tip

We have added the ability to have AI generate similar questions live in teacher paced mode. This is a great way to quickly create new questions to further assess student understanding during a live lesson.

Admin Tip

Paired passages are typically difficult for teachers to provide to their students in a digital format. Formative has added the ability to easily show two reading passages side by side to enable possibilities for compare and contrast to drive higher level thinking.
Resource

What’s New with Formative for the 2023-2024 School Year

Download our free, one-page resource for an at-a-glance overview of all the new enhancements to the Formative platform for the 2023 school year. Prepare yourself for the back-to-school season with details on enhanced class and formative management, supercharged creation features, expanded student support options, and real-time instructional data access.

Download Now
Resource

What’s New with Formative for the 2023-2024 School Year

Download our free, one-page resource for an at-a-glance overview of all the new enhancements to the Formative platform for the 2023 school year. Prepare yourself for the back-to-school season with details on enhanced class and formative management, supercharged creation features, expanded student support options, and real-time instructional data access.

Resource

What’s New with Formative for the 2023-2024 School Year

Download our free, one-page resource for an at-a-glance overview of all the new enhancements to the Formative platform for the 2023 school year. Prepare yourself for the back-to-school season with details on enhanced class and formative management, supercharged creation features, expanded student support options, and real-time instructional data access.

Download Now

Additional methods for provided student support and feedback

We know that many teachers use Formative to provide students with valuable and timely feedback to help support their learning. We have added even more ways to meet students in their important learning moments. You can now add hints or even multiple hints on questions to provide students with some assistance while attempting to solve a problem. Or perhaps you want to leverage answer choice explanations to provide students information after they unsuccessfully attempt a question. Many of you already use the ability to provide students with direct and targeted feedback and so we have made this easier by providing the ability to reuse your recent comments.  

At Formative, we are excited about ways to promote student engagement and celebrate learning! We have created the Formative student practice tool, which enables students to create their own interactive flashcards. Additionally, we have added a checkmark celebration for students who answer a question correctly on any formative using instant scoring.

Teacher Tip

Think about how you could scaffold hints to provide a structured level of support for your students on any particular problem. Additionally if you are stuck try using AI generation to help create a hint for you.

Admin Tip

Teachers can use our new answer choice explanations on multiple choice, multiple selection, and true/false questions.

Access real time data to inform your instruction

Formative provides teachers and administrators with powerful access to real time data in order to best inform learning insights and student progress on associated standards. We have made several improvements to our teacher-paced mode which is a great tool for live synchronous activities. You now have the ability to further differentiate pacing to accommodate individual student needs by using student release groups.  Another great way to be informed on student work is to use our new notification settings for all or just late student submissions

We know that viewing live student response data provides teachers with immediate insights that can help them inform their instruction and best support each student. We have added two new ways to visualize data on formatives with a brand new summary chart to provide overall insights as well as a frequency chart to easily identify distribution of response.

Teacher Tip

When using the frequency chart if you click on the bar graph for a certain response it will select all students who provided that answer. This provides an easy way to do batch scoring or provide feedback for the entire group.

Admin Tip

Admins: When you give a common assessment using Formative at your school/district it is now easy to view participation details, gauge overall performance, and get insights on specific standards addressed by using the summary report.

Download a summary handout on all of these announcements here!

Resource