When students are engaged in project-based learning, the classroom becomes an active community.. Students are using mathematics practices, talking, and working together to solve problems and complete complex tasks. Students often think of PBL as fun, unaware of the intense learning that’s taking place. It’s necessary to purposely assess this learning during PBL instead of using traditional testing. By doing so, evidence can be evaluated by rubrics through PBL.

Formative assessments take many different forms: exit tickets, quizzes, rough drafts of written assignments, prototypes for projects, and more. Whenever you have evidence of students learning, it can be used as a formative assessment. Even the summative test results can be used to see areas of strengths and weaknesses to inform the teaching of future classes.