Formative review

Formative is an assessment tool for building assignments and watching students answer them live. You add questions, a worksheet or a PDF, students work through it on their own devices, and a grid on your screen fills in as they type, draw or choose answers. Newsela bought Formative in 2023, and the two products now connect, so teachers can add Formative activities to Newsela texts. Formative suits secondary teachers, especially in maths and science, who want to see how students work, not only whether they got the answer right.

Who it’s for

Formative fits teachers who walk round a room looking over shoulders and want to do the same from the front. In a maths lesson, you set five equations, students solve them on a drawing canvas, and you see each student’s working on your screen as it happens. You spot the three students who keep dropping a negative sign and go to them first.

It is also a good fit for departments that want common assessments with shared marking. A science department can build one end-of-unit test, run it in every class and compare results.

If you mostly want a quick, fun review game, Gimkit or Kahoot! is faster to set up and more fun for students.

What it does well

The live response view is the reason to use Formative. Each student is a row, each question is a column, and answers appear as students work. For open questions and drawings, you see the actual response, not a score. You can type feedback to a student while they are still on the question, and they see it straight away.

Show-your-work questions let students draw, write or annotate on a canvas. For graphs, diagrams, chemical structures or geometry, this is far more useful than multiple choice. You can upload an existing PDF worksheet and add answer boxes over it, so a department doesn’t have to rebuild its resources from scratch.

Many question types mark themselves, and you can apply rubrics to the ones that don’t. Feedback, scores and regrading all happen in the same screen, so you don’t have to switch between a marking tool and a gradebook.

Luna, Formative’s AI assistant, generates activities from a prompt, a PDF or a document, aligned to standards. The paid plans also include anti-cheating tools and released state test items for US schools. The Balanced Assessment plan adds a Respondus LockDown Browser for formal tests and translation into more than 50 languages.

Formative rosters through Google Classroom, Clever and ClassLink, which saves typing class lists.

Where it falls short

The free plan is hard to pin down. Formative’s homepage offers a free plan with basic question types, but its pricing page lists only paid plans. Its help center describes limits on free accounts, including a cap on monthly PDF uploads and a short look-back period for past data. A teacher who builds a term’s work on the free plan may find features missing at the point they need them.

Building takes longer than in a quiz game. A good Formative assignment with drawing questions and rubrics takes real planning time, and the first few weeks are slow. Teachers who want to throw together a starter quiz in two minutes will find it heavy.

The live view needs your attention. It shows you a lot, but only if you look at it during the lesson. On a busy day with a cover class, it turns into a marking pile.

Pricing

Formative’s pricing page, checked in November 2026, lists a Classroom plan at $249 a year per teacher, billed annually. A Small School plan costs $3,125 a year for up to 250 students and adds shared libraries, standards tagging and school dashboards. Balanced Assessment by Formative is quoted per district based on enrolment and adds the premium item bank, LockDown Browser, AI guardrails for districts and district dashboards. The homepage also offers a free plan with basic question types.

Privacy and data

Formative says it complies with FERPA and COPPA, does not sell student information, and that districts control data access, retention and deletion. Its site links to Newsela’s privacy policy and terms, so the Newsela documents govern how your data is handled. We could not find published security certifications such as SOC 2 on Formative’s own pages, so ask for them during procurement.

Luna uses AI to generate activities. The Balanced Assessment plan includes a configuration studio that lets a district set guardrails on how Luna works, which suits districts with an AI policy that restricts teacher use of AI. Check what student data, if any, goes to AI providers before you turn it on.

Verdict

Formative is one of the best tools for seeing how students work in real time, especially in maths and science, where shown working matters. It costs more than most quiz tools and takes more planning, so it pays off for teachers and departments who will use it most lessons. Teachers who want a free quiz tool should start with Wayground, and those who want interactive slides with student responses should look at Pear Deck.

See the best Formative alternatives