Introduction
Entry and exit tickets are short and effective formative assessments that provide you with a snapshot of student understanding of a previous lesson. Students complete entry tickets at the beginning of class to help them reactivate knowledge and prepare for the day’s instruction. Exit tickets are turned in at the end of the lesson, providing students with a reminder of the most important concepts. Using these tickets will allow you to set the tone for learning, engage students in review, and collect valuable data to use to inform your own teaching.
Entry and Exit Tickets
Formative assessments are essential in helping teachers measure student understanding. In this segment, Rachel and Kate demonstrate the use of two formative assessment tools that give teachers the information they need to design their future lessons!
Strategy Breakdown
Your goal when using Entry Tickets is to measure student understanding of material you taught earlier in your unit, or in the lesson the day before. Use the data from this formative assessment to determine the pacing of your future lessons, and what material you will have to revisit with your students.
When you begin instruction of a new objective:
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Greet your students at the door with a set of 3 questions that review the previous day’s lesson, or material from earlier in the unit. The questions should allow students to provide quick answers related to the objectives you set in those lessons.
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Engage your students! Find ways to excite them about the formative assessment so that they will be eager to show you what they recall. (Ex. Use a short video, cite an example, or even demonstrate with a quick role play scenario.)
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Set a timer for 5 minutes and collect the entry tickets when your students are finished. You can use the activity as a springboard for a quick discussion of previous content.
After you have collected the Entry Tickets:
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Read through the responses and determine what your students have mastered and what you will need to reteach.
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Plan your future lessons according to your results. You can use the Lesson Plan Structure Unit Organizer or Daily Lesson Plan to help you restructure your lesson.
Your goal when using Exit Tickets is to measure student proficiency in the content you taught in that day’s lesson. Use the data from this formative assessment to determine student mastery of your objective, and what material you will have to reteach or extend to build student proficiency.
Preparing for your lesson:
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As you build your lesson plan around the objective you want students to master, consider these questions: what do you need students to understand by the end of the lesson to meet the objective? How can students demonstrate proficiency?
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Create 3 questions that will quickly indicate whether or not students can demonstrate proficiency in the learning objective.
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Turn this set of questions into “tickets” to deliver to your students at the end of your lesson. These will be what you collect to assess student understanding of your lesson.
At the end of your lesson:
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Give each student an exit ticket at the end of your lesson. Set a timer for 5 minutes.
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Collect the exit tickets when students are finished.
After you have collected the Exit Tickets:
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Grade these exit tickets for a quick, easy check of student understanding. This formative assessment will allow you to see what students have mastered and what concepts might require reteaching to individual students or the whole group.
Entry/Exit Ticket Template
Having a structured template makes creating Entry/Exit Tickets easy! Simply download this form, and edit it to include questions that allow students to show proficiency in your objective. Make one copy for each student, and take them up afterward to measure student understanding!
Complications
Although Entry and Exit Tickets are proven successful strategies, there are some issues that you should be aware of prior to application:
- Know what proficiency looks like. It is important to know what success looks like on formative assessments so you know where to go next! Before you plan your entry and exit tickets, list what concrete knowledge students should be able to demonstrate to you by the end of the lesson. Sit down with a colleague or your PLC to establish what the baseline should be for proficiency on an objective so you have common expectations and approaches. You can also look for examples of student proficiency in your state standard resources.
- Get ready to be surprised - and to adjust. Sometimes you will think that students understand your content, only to find that their formative assessment data says otherwise. This is why formative assessment is so important! Think about it: if you hadn’t done the formative assessment, you would not have known about this learning gap until it was too late. It’s important at this point to take a step back and make adjustments to your lesson plans to recover the material. After all, the primary focus of formative assessments is to measure student progress. If your students are not grasping the material, take the time to create a reteaching activity for the next day that clarifies what students misunderstood about the objective.
- Try new things! While the Entry and Exit Tickets are quick, effective strategies for measuring student learning, you do not want to overuse them. Rather, vary your strategies to keep your students engaged. Use other options such as holding up whiteboards to answer a summarizing question, using a KWL chart to indicate understanding throughout a lesson, or conducting a class poll using a digital app. These options give you an opportunity to scan the room for levels of proficiency and collect immediate results.
Preparatory Questions
- How will the data I collect from Entry and Exit Tickets inform my planning process for the rest of the unit?
- All students are different - and each class is different! How will I modify my Entry and Exit Tickets to better suit my students’ needs?
- How can I ensure that my Exit Ticket will indicate whether or not my students are proficient in the objective I have created?
- How will my use of Entry and Exit Tickets increase student engagement in my lesson and content?
