Whether they’re completed on a piece of paper, a tablet, or a whiteboard, exit tickets are a powerful tool to use in your classroom.
Exit tickets are formative assessments that provide information about your students’ learning and understanding of a topic faster than any other tool in the classroom. They provide you with a snapshot of what your students need from you. When used correctly, exit tickets can completely transform your teaching.
Exit tickets are not a formal assessment. Instead, they are an informal quick check that assesses how well a student understands the material they are learning throughout a unit. A well-designed exit ticket can show if a student has a surface level or deep understanding of the material. They help teachers pinpoint any misconceptions and allow teachers to make any necessary adjustments to their teaching and planning.
Exit tickets are a type of formative assessment. What is the difference between a formative and summative assessment?
The goal of a formative assessment is to monitor student learning. Formative assessments provide quick feedback to teachers so that they can improve or modify their instruction to meet their students’ needs.
Formative assessments can help students identify their specific strengths and weaknesses on a particular topic. For example, when working on adding decimals, a formative assessment may show that the student can properly add multi-digit numbers, but that they struggle with place value and lining up the decimal point in the correct place.
With this information, the teacher can now address that students’ particular needs.
For teachers, formative assessments help them to modify and differentiate their instruction based on their students’ needs. These quick checks help teachers recognize where students are struggling so they can address the problems immediately.
Summative assessments, on the other hand, evaluate student learning at the end of an instructional unit (think post-assessments). Teachers compare students’ summative assessments to a specific standard or benchmark to show a level of mastery.
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Below are my top 5 reasons why you NEED to be using exit tickets in your classroom.
- Immediate Reflection: Exit tickets help students immediately reflect on what they have learned.
- Student Focus: Exit tickets encourage students to pay attention and focus on the lesson.
- Get More From Your Lesson: Exit tickets are quicker than homework or other assignments and will be completed on the spot. If a student is practicing a concept incorrectly or is frustrated, you can catch it at that moment.
- Immediate Feedback: Exit tickets provide teachers with immediate feedback on how well students have understood a topic or lesson.
- Quickly Modify Instruction: Exit tickets help teachers monitor or modify their instruction. You can modify your instruction and pull small groups right at that moment for re-teaching.
Exit tickets can be used at any time. You can use them with your students before your lesson, during your lesson, or after your lesson.
It’s important to remember that their purpose, again, is to see what your students know so that you can modify your teaching accordingly.
To implement exit tickets:
- First determine the topic or standard that you want students to think about or show their understanding of. You can see on the exit tickets I have created that I highlight this topic or standard with a learning goal that is written in student language.
2. Provide each student with an exit ticket. (If you don’t have a resource like this available to you, I have created Differentiated Exit Tickets that you can see HERE. These exit tickets are 100% EDITABLE. You can change the language to match your standards).
3. Review the learning goal. You can go over the learning goal aloud with your students, or give them a second to read it themselves.
4. Give students the opportunity to complete the exit ticket. Feel free to walk the room, looking over students’ shoulders in order to mentally note student intervention, re-teaching, or enrichment groups.
5. When students are finished with their exit tickets, remind them to review their work and rate their level of understanding in the top right corner of the exit ticket. You can read more about students rating their level of understanding HERE and HERE.
6. Collect the exit tickets and review them to assess student learning and understanding.
7. Use this information to form student groups (if necessary) and modify your teaching.
That’s it! In 3-5 minutes, you have all the information you need in order to move forward with PURPOSEFUL teaching.
All of the work has been done for you in my Differentiated Exit Ticket resources. Here is THE COMPLETE BUNDLE!
Quick, extremely meaningful feedback to transform your teaching, and the work has been done for you! Plus, they are NOW EDITABLE!
You can purchase all of my Differentiated Math Exit Tickets HERE or by clicking the button below.
