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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Download a summary handout on all of these announcements here!