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Understanding students, adapting instruction, and addressing equity
The ideas students bring to class and their perspectives on what is happening in the classroom change constantly. Keeping track of these changes is useful for adapting lessons, nurturing student self-reflection, increasing student ownership of learning, and building a teaching practice responsive to learners' needs. In this article, we discuss how a simple formative assessment tool-exit tickets-can be used to help teachers do this work.
Exit tickets are short response tasks that teachers administer to students after an activity (such as laboratory experiment) or class period. They present opportunities for teachers to elicit students' thinking without affecting their grade, provide individualized feedback, and identify learning needs or modifications to an instructional plan (Black and Wiliam 1998).
Exit tickets can be used to ask students about their understanding of a science idea (e.g., respiration or sound energy), everyday experiences that relate to the current unit, or comfort level with a given skill (e.g., use of calorimeters or data analysis). They can also be used to record the strategies students used to prepare for an assignment, small group dynamics, or whether students felt their ideas were valued in class.
To be effective, an exit ticket should have specific prompts for students and take only about five minutes to complete. Students can record their responses on index cards, sticky notes, notebook paper, or online (e.g., Google Forms, Padlet, Schoology, etc.). Ideally, student responses inform the next stages of learning by highlighting whether teachers should clarify ideas, reteach them, extend them, offer practice, introduce new ideas, or restructure future instructional activities (Marshall 2018).
Additionally, studies suggest that formative assessments can be used to do more than evaluate student content understanding-they can help develop and maintain equitable teaching routines. The Center for Educational Research and Innovation (CERI 2005) highlights how "teachers using formative assessment approaches and techniques are better prepared to meet diverse students' needs-through differentiation and adaptation of teaching [to] achieve a greater equity of student outcomes." Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995) examines the concept of using formative assessments to increase equity in classrooms, arguing that among other factors, equity depends on teachers maintaining fluid teacher-student relationships and demonstrating connectedness with all students.
Exit tickets are unique in that they routinize access to...