4 Formative Assessment Templates for Classrooms in 2025

More often than not, educators move from one lesson to the next without fully knowing what their students understand. Time is short. Curriculum maps are tight. And sadly, check-ins often become routine rather than revealing anything meaningful. 

A teacher asking: “What’s one thing you still don’t understand from yesterday’s lesson?” is doing more than filling time before the lesson begins. They’re gathering evidence, creating space for reflection, and laying the groundwork for responsive teaching. 

In a responsive classroom, these checkpoints shape what comes next and how it’s delivered. 

But there’s an issue: while formative assessment is widely encouraged, most templates you will find online are either surface-level or disconnected from actual teaching methods. A quick emoji poll. A generic reflection prompt. A quiz repurposed as an ongoing feedback. Too often, the “formative” part becomes a mere checkbox rather than a strategy. 

This guide takes a different approach. 

Instead of simply listing formative assessment templates, we organize them by instructional purpose. Because when templates are aligned with why you’re assessing, they stop being activities and start becoming tools for more profound, more responsive teaching. And when paired with online platforms like Wooclap, these templates become interactive activities that are data-rich. 

Read on to learn how to move toward purposeful formative assessment, one that is aligned with how students learn. 

1. Self-Assessment Templates

One of the most powerful changes in formative assessment happens when students stop asking if they got things right and start asking, “How well do I even understand this, and what can I do next?” 

When student understanding, their efforts, or learning process is assessed against clear learning goals, they begin to internalize what success looks like. For educators, self-assessment reveals how student progress is perceived. So, what structure or templates reveal both content gaps and confidence issues? 

Here are a few templates that work:

Confidence Scale Check-In

This template is a classic. You ask students a simple question, such as, “How confident are you about multiplying fractions?” and provide them with a scale from 1 to 5. Here’s how it works:

• 1 – Very easy
• 2 – Easy
• 3 – Neutral or unsure
• 4 – Difficult
• 5 –Very Difficult

With Woclap, this becomes super easy. You can set up a live poll using the 1-5 scale. The real-time results give you an instant visual read: Are most students at a 2 or are a few confidently sitting at 5? 

Once that’s in, follow it up with a short open-ended prompt. Individual students can respond anonymously, and you get honest insights into what’s holding them back. You can use this template mid-lesson, at the end of a specific topic, or even right before a quiz. It’s quick, revealing, and easy to act on. 

Traffic Light Self-Assessment

Red, yellow, green; it doesn’t get simpler than this. But don’t be fooled by the simplicity. This template fosters student comprehension through color-coded categories. 

• Green means “got it.”
• Yellow means “Sort of.”
• Red means “not yet.”

You can set the traffic light template as an interactive web quiz on Wooclap, complete with color-coded labels, and let students respond anonymously. It’s a low-pressure way to surface who’s struggling. Use it right before independent work or at the end of direct instruction. 

Rubric-Based Self-Reflection

Here, students use a short rubric to score themselves on specific criteria. They may be evaluating a paragraph they wrote, a presentation they gave, or even something they built. This template is quite powerful because it includes a rating that allows you to ask two follow-up questions, including: 

• What did I do well?
• What will I improve next time?

You can display the rubric using a slide in Wooclap, then use a quick poll to gather their ratings. After that, follow up with open-ended questions to collect their reflections. 

A major tip here is to compare student abilities and their self-ratings with your rubric scores. If there’s a big mismatch, that’s not a mistake; it’s an opportunity to talk. Where do they see success? Where are they recognizing it yet?

2. Peer Assessment Templates

Feedback is everything in formative assessment. And while teacher feedback is powerful, students sometimes need to hear it from their peers as well. Peer assessment helps learners develop a critical eye, give constructive and real-time feedback, and see various ways to solve similar problems. 

But again, this works best when student feedback is structured and supported. These templates work well:

Two Stars and a Wish Feedback Sheet

This one is a favorite in most classrooms because it is warm, clear, and easy to use.  Each student gives: 

• Two Stars — Two things their peer did well
• One Wish — One suggestion for improvement

It’s a great balance of praise and constructive feedback. You can print this as a simple worksheet or even run it digitally with Wooclap. Try using open-ended questions on Wooclap where individual students type their stars and wishes anonymously. 

This removes the awkwardness some students feel when giving feedback. Moreover, it helps them focus on what they say, not who they’re saying it to. 

Peer Rubric with Sentence Starters

This template gives students a mini rubric plus sentence starters to guide their feedback. It could look like this: 

• Your introduction was clear because…
• I think your strongest point was…
• Next time, consider adding…

Besides getting a response beyond “It was good,” this helps students use respectful academic language. You can display each sentence starter using a Wooclap slide, and then invite peer feedback through open-text inputs. If you wish to collect responses in real-time while students are reviewing each other’s work, that works beautifully too. 

Guided Group Discussion Reflection

After a group activity, you might want to reflect on student collaboration. This template asks students to consider: 

• What went well in our group work?
• What do we improve next time?
• Did everyone participate equally?

You can create a quick survey with these prompts and allow small groups to submit responses anonymously. It’s also a great way to collect data on soft skills like communication, responsibility, and teamwork. 

3. Exit Ticket Templates

Sometimes you end a lesson and ask if you know what stuck with the students. Exit tickets can help you figure that out. Here are common exit ticket templates:

3-2-1 Reflection

This one is a classic, and for a good reason. It helps students organize their thoughts while revealing how they are processing what they learned. You simply ask them to share:

• 3 things they learned
• 2 interesting ideas or connections
• 1 question they still have

It’s structured easily and works across any subject. On Wooclap, you can set this up as a web quiz or survey with three response fields. You can even take it a step further by turning the “1 question” responses into a word cloud. That way, you can instantly see what’s confusing your class as a whole. If 10 students are asking about the same concept? That’s your sign to reteach or reinforce it in the next class. 

Muddiest Point

Sometimes the most helpful thing to ask is also the simplest: “What part of today’s lesson was the most confusing?” This template gives students a safe space to admit where they’re struggling.

Wooclap’s open-ended question is a perfect starting point. To make it more useful for instruction, you could create it as this:

• Q1: What part of the lesson did you find confusing?
• Q2: Why do you think it was confusing or unclear? 
• Q3: What would help make this more straightforward?

You can also combine it with a live poll, like “How confident do you feel about today’s topic on a scale of 1-5?” We previously provided an approach for this. 

One-Minute Summary

Want to know if your students truly understand? Ask them to explain the whole lesson in just one sentence. It’s harder than it sounds, and that’s the point. On Wooclap, you can try using word clouds to get a quick snapshot of key phrases they are pulling from the lesson. 

4. Quick Checks and Immediate Feedback

Educators may decide they want to know right now. Did the students get it? Or is the teacher about to leave half the class behind? Quick checks are a way to assess understanding while student learning is still in progress. 

What makes quick checks powerful is their instant nature. You are catching the misconceptions now. Some templates to use include: 

Live Multiple Choice Checks

Right after introducing a new concept, toss out 3 to 4 option questions like, “Which of these best explains photosynthesis?” or “Which step comes next in solving this equation?” Wooclap’s live poll and multiple-choice questions are made for moments like this.

You will see results come in immediately. Did 80% get it right? Great, keep moving. Did half the class miss it? That’s a sign to pause and clarify. Moreover, since the results are visual, students can reflect alongside you. 

Thumbs Up/Thumbs Down (Digitally)

This old-school strategy remains effective, especially when applied digitally. Physically, students might raise their thumbs if they are good, hold them sideways if they are unsure, or lower them if they are lost. But not everyone feels confident raising their hand that way. 

Wooclap’s rating poll can recreate this strategy, but anonymously and with better insight. Ask, “Do you think you’re confident about what we just learned?” and let students rate themselves from 1-3. 

Flash Review with a Word Cloud

If you want a quick summary of key ideas students picked up during a mini-lesson? Ask them to type in one word or phrase that stood out to them. Then use word cloud to display all responses in real time. 

If the word cloud fills up with accurate, on-topic terms, you know they are following. If you see off-topic or vague words, you know you must revisit the main idea. 

Why Strategy-Aligned Templates Make All the Difference

Let’s take a step back. Why did we organize all these formative assessment templates by instructional strategy, rather than just listing them all together? Because strategy brings clarity and purpose. 

When you match these templates to a clear pedagogical goal, it becomes easier to pick the right formative assessment tools for the job. Moreover, these templates save you time. You’re not reinventing the wheel every lesson. You have go-to formats that work across subjects and support differentiated instruction. 

With platforms like Wooclap, you get insights. You will see more than just who has their hand up; you’ll see how the whole class is thinking. 

Want to learn about other formative assessment examples? We wrote a whole cluster of articles to help you understand everything you need to know about the formative assessment process.

So here’s the final encouragement. Join other educators today to experiment, start small, select a strategy that aligns with your lesson goal, and try one of these templates.