7 Easy and Effective Strategies to Check for Understanding

September 30, 2021

Why is it important that teachers check for student understanding?

It is important for us to verify that students are learning what we are teaching them by using strategies to check for understanding. Check for understanding activities allows us to make instructional changes if necessary and modify our instruction. Checks for understanding should be low-stakes formative assessments that measure students learning in real-time. Teachers can revise in direct response to the results receive and collect information on how to differentiate. This is also another way to see what misconceptions or misunderstandings students may have. Checking for understanding doesn’t have to be a long-drawn-out process-it is meant to be a quick and easy way to make sure students are on the right track.

Below you will find 7 easy and effective strategies to check for understanding that do not require a lot of effort. Some require a little more setup than others, but most require little-to-no prep beforehand.

How to check for understanding during a lesson

Nearpod

Nearpod is one of my favorite platforms to ask questions to check for understanding. There is so much that you can do with Nearpod. It is a digital interactive platform that allows teachers to present lessons while providing real-time feedback to students. You can use Nearpod for your entire lesson or use it for quick formative assessments. They have gamified activities you can incorporate into your lessons or again just use them by assessing student understanding. They provide personalized data, live formative assessments with real-time feedback, which is one of the best parts in my opinion. Students who receive immediate feedback have a significantly larger increase in performance and those who received delayed feedback. If you would like to learn more about what Nearpod can do check out this blog post about Nearpod.

student happy because she got immediate results from her nearpod lesson — Students greatly benefit with check for understanding activities.

Socrative

Socrative can be used to assess students digitally and you can personalize your class. Teachers can use formative assessments through their quizzes, their quick question polls, exit tickets, and a game called space race. Socrative will instantly grade and provide visual results to help you identify opportunities where students may need remediation or acceleration. Students connect to your unique room by opening their apps or joining your room online from any device. Some of the features of Socrative include multiple-choice questions, true or false questions, and open-ended questions. You can have students vote on results, create your own quizzes, or share quizzes with other teachers. Give this as an end-of-the-class exit ticket or play the space race game. The best part to me is that you can view students’ results in real-time and it provides excellent reporting that you can download email or send to your drive.

Edpuzzle

I love Edpuzzle because students can benefit from flipped learning wherever they go. One of the main reasons I love Edpuzzle so much is that you can use any video (YouTube, TedEd, etc) and it will automatically grade it. This provides immediate feedback to students and the teacher in real-time. It also provides an opportunity for students to rewind and re-watch any section of a video for further understanding if they miss the question.

teacher is able to relax because edpuzzle will automatically grade student work. — Teachers can reduce grading by EdPuzzle automatically grading student work to check for understanding.

Kahoot or quizizz

Kahoots to me will always be one of the OG strategies to check for understanding. Students join kahoots that are hosted live and use the app to submit their answers. They can complete self-paced challenges they can study at home or on the go and it will automatically grade and provide results for them to see. You can create or edit your own Kahoot in just minutes or you can search among the millions of already made Kahoots on any topic. If you’re short on time this is great because you can choose a topic that you want to review and you can combine different question types to increase engagement. If you want to delete questions you don’t like then you can customize each Kahoot to tailor your student’s needs.

Teachers can assign student-paced challenges for content review or play them live in class. You can host Kahoot either in-person or virtually if you are still doing distance learning. Kahoot is a free app for teachers and students. However, there is an optional upgrade that will unlock advanced features like an image library with millions of images, advanced question types such as puzzles, polls, open-ended questions, and slides. I can say that I have never used the premium features even though I have a premium account.

Quizizz

Quizizz is one of my next favorite apps to quickly assess student learning. Students can use any device without having to use an app just by going to joinmyquiz.com. From there, they type in the unique code to join the game with your class. They can see the questions and the answer choices on their own device so the only thing that they see on the projector is the leaderboard. You can find free quizzes on any topic or create your own to host. Kahoot and Quizizz are very similar except for Kahoot you have to project the questions and answer on your screen versus quizzes you don’t have to project anything because everything is on the student’s individual devices.

Post-it Notes

Post-it notes are the old school way of checking for student understanding that I still used to this day if I want to quickly in less than 30 seconds figure out what students need more help in. They can quickly write down their responses on one side with their name on the back so no one sees who it is. Students can put them on a bulletin board or they can slap him up on the door or the wall as they’re walking out of the classroom. It is a very quick, easy, tried-and-true way to check for student understanding. There is literally zero prep except for passing out a Post-It note and prep is minimal by simply planning as many questions you want them to answer before you want to collect their responses.

Whiteboards

Whiteboards are another one of my favorite ways to check for student understanding. Specifically, when we are playing games like Jeopardy because they can just answer the question on their whiteboard, hold it up, I can scan the room to see who has got it and who doesn’t quickly and easily. The only caveat would is that some students tend to look around the room before they write their response. I can typically tell those are the ones that don’t know the answer because they are looking around before they write anything down on their board. Students love using whiteboards and dry erase markers and it never seems to go out of style. The only prep for this is passing out the markers and whiteboards and have some questions ready that you want to assess students on.

low prep ways to check for student understanding are post-it notes and whiteboards. — Don’t underestimate the power of post-it notes and whiteboards to check for student understanding.

Exit tickets (either paper or digital)

Exit tickets can be either paper or digital strategies to check for understanding. The six other items listed above can be turned into an exit ticket whether you want to do it digitally, use a whiteboard, or Post-it notes. Any of these can be used as an exit ticket simply by having a set of questions ready that you are assessing. All an exit ticket is if you are unfamiliar with it, is a set of a couple of questions to gauge students’ understanding before they head out the door. This gives you a great idea of knowing what your students understand in regards to the content and if any differentiation or acceleration needs to be done or the next day in order to better serve those students.

I would love to hear any other strategies to check for understanding that you have. I’m sure there are tons of other different ways that teachers assess for understanding and I would love to for you to share them!

I absolutely love sharing with y’all and would love to connect on IG or Facebook. Follow me there and send me a DM with what you need or want more of because I am here to help you out!