Coaching practices for Formative Assessment

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Formative Assessment, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

• When I just hand someone my assessment they go passive and defensive, like I’m doing something to them
• Whenever I ask how I’m doing, the answer comes back as a verdict on what I already screwed up, and I spend the whole conversation defending myself instead of actually learning anything I could use next time.
• When a study session feels good I walk away assuming I learned everything in it, and when it feels like a slog I assume none of it stuck
• I walk into every test sure I’ll do well and walk out shocked by the score
• When I help someone learn I either smother them with so much help they never struggle, or leave them stranded and lost

Practices that may help

1. Ask what the person already knows before offering your assessment
   Ask the person to evaluate their own performance before giving yours.
   The Feedback Sandwich: Why It Doesn’t Work and What to Do Instead
2. Calibration practice
   Predict your performance before each retrieval test, then compare prediction to outcome.
   Self-Regulated Learning: Taking Control of How You Learn
3. Ask for ideas about the future, not assessments of the past
   Replace "how did I do?" with "what ideas do you have for how I could do better?"
   Feedforward: Future-Focused Feedback That Actually Changes Behavior
4. Global vs. local JOL separation
   Rate individual items separately from your general sense of "how the session went" — they diverge.
   Judgments of Learning: Why You Misjudge What You’ve Learned
5. Post-session reflection
   Immediately after a learning session, evaluate what you learned, what strategies worked, and what to do next.
   Self-Regulated Learning: Taking Control of How You Learn
6. Confidence-accuracy gap tracking
   After each test, compute and record the gap between your predicted and actual scores.
   Feeling of Knowing: Why Your Confidence Misleads You
7. Provide contingent support: more help when needed, less when not
   Calibrate help to the learner’s actual performance moment by moment rather than delivering a fixed dose.
   Scaffolding: The Art of Temporary Learning Support
8. Reduce: convert main notes to questions in the cue column
   After the session, cover your notes and write a question in the cue column for each main idea.
   Cornell Note-Taking: A System for Learning, Not Just Recording
9. Seek developmental feedback, not just performance feedback
   Ask for feedback that challenges your assumptions about how you see, not just how you perform.
   Kegan’s Subject-Object Theory, Made Practical
10. Real-time self-monitoring
    Check comprehension actively during study — pausing to test yourself rather than assuming understanding.
    Self-Regulated Learning: Taking Control of How You Learn

Describe your situation in your own words to search the complete practice library.