How to Make Formative Assessments on the Fly: 2026 Guide
TL;DR
On-the-fly formative assessment means checking student understanding spontaneously during a lesson, not before or after it. Research by Black and Wiliam found that formative assessment can accelerate learning by six to nine months. This glossary defines every key term, walks through practical techniques you can use without preparation, and explains how AI tools can compress assessment creation from minutes to seconds.
Teachers know the feeling. You’re midway through a lesson and something feels off. Eyes glaze over. Answers thin out. The energy shifts. You need to know what students actually understand right now, not tomorrow after you grade a quiz. That instinct to pause and check is the foundation of on-the-fly formative assessment.
This glossary is a quick-reference guide covering the terms, techniques, and tools that make spontaneous assessment work. Whether you teach kindergarten or AP courses, the strategies here require little or no preparation and produce the kind of real-time feedback that actually changes instruction.
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Core Definitions
Before getting into specific techniques for how to make formative assessments on the fly, it helps to nail down the terminology. These five terms form the conceptual backbone.
Formative Assessment
An ongoing, informal evaluation used to monitor student understanding and guide instruction during the learning process. Formative assessment is often called “assessment for learning” because its purpose is to inform teaching, not to assign final grades. It should never be graded. It can be as simple as asking a single question and having students hold up whiteboards with their responses.
Summative Assessment
The counterpart to formative assessment. Summative assessment measures how much a student has learned after a unit or course is complete. It is “assessment of learning.” Final exams, state tests, and end-of-unit projects all fall here. The critical difference: formative assessment shapes instruction in real time, while summative assessment evaluates outcomes after the fact.
On-the-Fly Assessment
This is the specific subcategory that matters most for this glossary. Education researcher Margaret Heritage identified three types of formative evidence-gathering: on-the-fly assessment, planned-for interaction, and curriculum-embedded assessment. On-the-fly assessment occurs spontaneously during a lesson. A teacher listening to group discussions hears students expressing misconceptions about a concept and immediately pivots the lesson to address them. There’s no pre-written script. It’s responsive teaching in action.
Planned-for Interaction
Pre-designed formative checks that a teacher builds into a lesson ahead of time. Think of a set of discussion questions written the night before, or a structured turn-and-talk embedded in slide 12. Planned-for interaction is still formative, but it’s not spontaneous. When people search for how to make formative assessments on the fly, they typically want techniques that go beyond planned-for interaction into genuinely improvised territory.
If you want to build formative checks directly into your lesson structure, an AI lesson plan generator can help you embed those planned-for moments without extra prep time.
Curriculum-Embedded Assessment
Assessments built directly into curriculum materials by the publisher or curriculum designer. These might include checkpoint questions in a textbook chapter or a diagnostic activity at the start of a unit. Teachers don’t create these; they come baked into the materials. Understanding this term helps clarify what on-the-fly assessment is not: it’s not pre-built, and it’s not someone else’s work. It’s yours, in the moment.
On-the-Fly Techniques Glossary
These are the specific strategies teachers can deploy without preparation. Each one answers the practical question of how to make formative assessments on the fly in a classroom setting.
Verbal and Physical Techniques
Think-Pair-Share
A structured protocol where students first think individually about a question, then discuss with a partner, and finally share ideas with the larger group. It moves students from silent reflection to discourse, giving teachers multiple checkpoints to listen for understanding. This is probably the most widely used on-the-fly technique in K-12 education, and for good reason: it takes zero materials and works at every grade level.
Corners
Each corner of the classroom corresponds to a position: agree, strongly agree, disagree, or strongly disagree. Share a lesson-related statement and have students physically move to the corner that represents their thinking. The movement itself reveals patterns instantly. You can see at a glance whether the class is split or unified, and you can follow up with students in the minority corner to hear their reasoning.
Popsicle Stick (Cold Call)
Write each student’s name on a popsicle stick and keep them in a jar. Ask a question, draw a name, and ask that student to respond. This prevents the same three eager hands from dominating every discussion and gives you a wider sample of understanding. Some teachers on education forums report keeping two jars (one “not yet called” and one “already called”) to ensure full coverage over a class period.
Keep the Question Going
Ask one student a question, then ask a second student whether that answer seems reasonable. Then ask a third student to explain why there’s agreement or disagreement. This chain-style questioning turns a single check into a multi-student assessment in under a minute.
Fist-to-Five
Students hold up zero to five fingers to indicate their confidence level on a topic. Zero means “I’m completely lost,” five means “I could teach this.” It’s fast and visual. Teachers can scan the room in seconds and identify who needs support.
Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, Thumbs Sideways
A simpler version of fist-to-five. Students respond to a statement or question with a thumb position. Sideways means “I’m unsure.” This works well with younger students who struggle with the five-point scale.
Written Quick-Checks
Exit Ticket (Exit Slip)
A quick written response students complete at the end of class. Prompts like “What’s one thing you learned today?” or “What’s still unclear?” give teachers concrete data to shape the next lesson. Exit tickets are technically planned if you design the prompt ahead of time, but many teachers use them spontaneously when a lesson doesn’t land as expected. For ready-made exit ticket ideas, check out this guide on exit ticket activities for the classroom.
Entry Ticket (Bell Ringer)
The reverse of an exit ticket. Students answer a question as they walk in, usually about the previous day’s material. It sets the tone and gives teachers an immediate read on retention. These pair well with bell ringer activities that double as warm-ups.
One-Minute Paper
Students write for exactly one minute in response to a prompt. Common versions: “What was the most important concept today?” and “What question do you still have?” The time constraint keeps it low-stakes and prevents overthinking.
Whiteboard Responses
Each student has a small dry-erase board. The teacher asks a question, students write their answer, and everyone holds up their board simultaneously. This gives immediate, class-wide visibility into understanding without the social pressure of raising a hand.
Dipsticks
A catch-all term for quick, informal formative checks. The name comes from the idea that these should be as easy as checking the oil in your car. Any technique that takes under two minutes and gives you a read on comprehension qualifies.
If you want to generate printable versions of exit tickets or one-minute paper templates, TeachTools’ worksheet generator creates customized, print-ready PDFs in seconds.
Observation-Based Techniques
Focused Observation
Walking the room with a clipboard, tablet, or roster and taking brief notes on what students are doing. A focused observation form can narrow your attention: Are students using the target vocabulary? Can they identify the key step in the process? This is the most “invisible” form of on-the-fly assessment because students often don’t realize it’s happening.
Anecdotal Notes
Short, factual notes about individual student behavior or responses during class. Unlike focused observation, anecdotal notes don’t follow a rubric. They’re freeform. Over time, they build a picture of each student’s trajectory. Practitioners on teaching forums recommend keeping a simple grid with student names and a column for each day, filling in one or two observations per period.
Gallery Walk
Students post their work around the room, then walk around to view and comment on each other’s responses. The teacher observes both the posted work and the student reactions to it. This works especially well after a group activity and provides a double layer of assessment data.
Digital and AI-Powered Techniques
Live Polling
Digital tools that allow teachers to push a question to student devices and see responses in real time. Polls facilitate immediate engagement and let teachers adjust their teaching strategies on the fly. This is one of the most direct answers to how to make formative assessments on the fly in a tech-equipped classroom. TeachTools offers an AI-powered survey creator that generates classroom polls quickly.
AI Quiz Generation
The teacher inputs a topic, standard, grade level, and question type, and an AI tool generates assessment items calibrated to that specification. The best platforms produce questions across multiple levels of Bloom’s taxonomy and create distractors that reflect common student misconceptions. This compresses what used to be a 20-minute task into about 30 seconds.
QR-Code Response Tools (e.g., Plickers)
Plickers uses paper cards with unique QR codes. The teacher asks a multiple-choice question, students hold up their card rotated to indicate their answer (A, B, C, or D), and the teacher scans the room with a phone camera. No student devices needed. It’s one of the best options for schools where students don’t have individual devices.
How AI Speeds Up On-the-Fly Assessment
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Browse All Tools →The traditional bottleneck with formative assessment isn’t knowing what to ask. It’s having the right question ready at the right moment. When you’re mid-lesson and realize students are struggling, you don’t have time to write a well-crafted multiple-choice question with plausible distractors.
AI changes this equation.
Modern AI quiz generators let teachers input a topic, grade level, and difficulty, then produce a usable assessment in seconds. The best tools use simple form-based inputs (topic, grade, question type) rather than requiring teachers to write detailed prompts. This matters because teachers making formative assessments on the fly don’t have time for prompt engineering.
One district educator in a TCEA community discussion noted that their district was piloting Brisk Teaching and found it effective for creating Google Form quizzes and providing feedback directly in Google Doc comments. Multiple educators in that thread highlighted how AI tools were reducing the friction of assessment creation.
That said, AI tools used in classrooms need to respect student privacy. Any platform handling assessment data should be FERPA-supportive. This means understanding whether the tool trains on your data, how it stores responses, and whether it meets your district’s security requirements.
The goal of AI in this context isn’t to replace teacher judgment. It’s to compress the creation step so teachers can focus on what they do best: reading the room, interpreting responses, and adjusting instruction.
Research Snapshot: Why On-the-Fly Assessment Works
Formative assessment isn’t just a “nice to have.” It’s one of the most well-supported practices in education research.
Black and Wiliam (1998) conducted a landmark meta-analysis reviewing hundreds of studies. They found that formative assessment has more effect on learning than any other single factor, including prior learning. The effect sizes ranged from 0.4 to 0.7 standard deviations.
Wiliam, Lee, Harrison, and Black (2004) tested these ideas in real classrooms with ordinary teachers over a full year. They found an effect size of 0.32 standard deviations, which translates to roughly an extra eight months of learning per year, or a 70% increase in the rate of student learning.
Hattie (2009) reported that feedback delivered in a formative context had an average effect size of 0.73, making it one of the highest-impact instructional strategies available.
Two findings from this research body deserve extra attention:
- Formative assessment is effective across all education levels, from elementary through higher education (Black & Wiliam, 1998; King & Nash, 2011).
- The greatest gains appear among low-attaining students. Black and Wiliam found that grades consistently demotivate low attainers while failing to challenge high attainers. Removing grades from formative work, and keeping it genuinely low-stakes, is what unlocks these gains.
As one Edutopia contributor put it, a single data point isn’t enough to plan the next instructional step. Teachers need a variety of formative assessment tools they can deploy quickly, seamlessly, and in a low-stakes way, all while not creating an unmanageable workload. That’s the whole argument for learning how to make formative assessments on the fly.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
Even well-intentioned teachers can undercut on-the-fly assessment by falling into a few traps.
Grading Formative Assessments
This is the most common mistake. The moment you attach a grade to an exit ticket or whiteboard check, it stops being formative. Students shift from “showing what I actually understand” to “performing for points.” Black and Wiliam’s research is clear on this: grades demotivate low attainers and make high attainers complacent. Keep formative work ungraded. When you do need to score assignments efficiently, separate that work from your formative checks and use a tool like an AI grading assistant for the summative side.
Relying on a Single Data Point
One exit ticket doesn’t tell you much. One thumbs-up check doesn’t confirm mastery. The power of on-the-fly assessment comes from triangulation: combining multiple quick checks across a lesson or week to build a complete picture. Use different techniques. Mix verbal with written. Alternate individual responses with partner discussions.
Over-Complicating the Technique
The simplest methods often work best. Teachers sometimes feel pressure to use elaborate digital tools when a whiteboard check or fist-to-five would do the job in 30 seconds. Match the technique to the moment. If you sense confusion during a lecture, stop and ask for thumbs. If you want deeper data on a specific concept, push a quick poll. Complexity isn’t the goal; information is.
Treating Assessment as an Add-On
On-the-fly assessment is not a separate activity bolted onto the end of a lesson. It should be woven into instruction itself. As researchers at Taylor & Francis have noted, even when teachers understand formative assessment theoretically, it remains challenging to implement it naturally during instruction. The fix is practice. Start with one technique per lesson and build from there.
Putting It All Together
Making formative assessments on the fly is a skill, not just a set of tricks. It requires three things: knowing your techniques, trusting your instincts about when students are struggling, and having tools that remove friction when you need to create something quickly.
Start with two or three techniques from this glossary. Practice them until they become automatic. Then layer in digital tools when they genuinely save time. The research is overwhelming: teachers who assess formatively, consistently, and without grades produce dramatically better learning outcomes.
Explore all 23 AI-powered tools built for K-12 teachers at TeachTools.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does “on the fly” mean in formative assessment?
“On the fly” means spontaneous, unplanned, and happening during instruction. Margaret Heritage’s framework identifies on-the-fly assessment as one of three formative evidence-gathering types, alongside planned-for interaction and curriculum-embedded assessment. When teachers make formative assessments on the fly, they’re responding to what they observe in real time rather than following a pre-written script.
What is the difference between formative and summative assessment?
Formative assessment monitors understanding during learning and is used to adjust instruction. Summative assessment measures how much was learned after instruction is complete. Formative is assessment for learning; summative is assessment of learning. Formative work should be ungraded, while summative work typically carries a grade.
How often should teachers use formative assessment?
There’s no fixed rule, but the research supports frequent, varied use. Many effective teachers run at least two or three quick checks per class period, mixing techniques so students don’t get fatigued by the same format. The key is consistency without rigidity.
Can AI help create formative assessments quickly?
Yes. AI quiz generators allow teachers to input a topic, grade level, and question type, then produce usable assessment items in seconds. This is especially helpful for making formative assessments on the fly because it removes the biggest barrier: time. For a deeper walkthrough, read this guide on creating AI quizzes for the classroom.
Should formative assessments ever be graded?
No. Grading defeats the purpose. Research consistently shows that grades on formative work demotivate struggling students and breed complacency in high achievers. The whole point is to create a safe space where students can reveal their actual understanding without fear of penalty.
What is the easiest on-the-fly formative assessment technique?
Thumbs up, thumbs down, thumbs sideways. It takes five seconds, requires zero materials, works at any grade level, and gives you an instant visual snapshot of the room. From there, you can decide whether to move on or reteach.
How do I know which technique to use in the moment?
Match the technique to the information you need. If you want a quick confidence check, use fist-to-five. If you need to see specific answers, use whiteboard responses or a live poll. If you want to hear student reasoning, use think-pair-share or keep the question going. The more techniques you have in your toolkit, the better you can match the tool to the moment.
Do students need devices for on-the-fly digital assessment?
Not always. Tools like Plickers use paper cards scanned by the teacher’s phone, so students don’t need any technology. For AI-generated quizzes, the teacher creates the assessment on their own device and can project it, print it, or push it to students depending on the available setup.