In a March 2017 article in Mathematics Teaching in the Middle School, Brent Duckor, Carrie Holmberg, and Joanne Rossi Becker (San José State University) propose seven different formative assessment techniques:

• Priming – Preparing the groundwork; establishing norms; acting to acculturate students to learning publicly. For example, a teacher might say: “I’m so glad you asked that question because it seemed like maybe some other people had the same question.”
• Pausing – Giving students adequate time to think and respond as individuals or as groups; the teacher poses a question to the whole class but doesn’t call on students for a few seconds, putting hand to chin in a pose reminiscent of Rodin’s Thinker and conveying the message, “We take our time to raise our hands. I am protecting individual student think time now.”
• Bouncing – Sampling a variety of student responses intentionally and systematically to better map terrain of student thinking: “Take 60 seconds. Talk with your team” or “Anyone have anything to add to that?”
• Probing – Asking follow-up questions that use information from actual student responses: “Based on what you saw around the room, would you stick with that answer?”
• Posing – Asking questions that size up the learner’s needs in the lesson and across the unit: “Why would the 3 x 2 x 4 box have less surface area than the 6 x 4 x 1 box?”
• Binning – Noticing patterns in student responses, categorizing them along learning trajectories, and using responses to inform next steps: The teacher displays several student solutions in correct and incorrect “bins” without disclosing an opinion and asks, “Which are correct?”
• Tagging – Publicly representing variation in student thinking by creating a snapshot or running record of a class’s responses: “So let’s come to an agreement as a group about terms.”