5 Easy, End of Class Reviews to Check & Build Students' Content Mastery
Updated: December 16, 2025. Reviewer: Dr. Rose Sebastian, Ed.D.
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Fast, Formative Assessments for the End of Class
So you teach the most amazing class ever and then students leave. Done. But how do you know what they actually took away from the lesson or what questions they still have? How do you help cement what you taught in their brains so it doesn’t all slip away tomorrow?
Some of the most seminal research in education centers on the importance of formative assessments. In addition to knowing how students do on big tests and projects, we also want to know how they are doing along the way. The more you know and the more often you know it, the easier it gets to correct misunderstandings, reinforce key ideas, and shore up any skills that are coming up wobbly– and to save time by not spending extra instructional hours on the things that students already know a lot about.
Fast, end of class formatives are a super helpful way to do this. There are lots of easy ways to do this from having students hold up their fingers to tell you how confident they feel on what they learned to monitoring their facial expressions and homework– both of which will tell you a lot.
The five, fast and easy activities here all double as informal assessments of students’ learnings and strategies for helping students cement that learning.
End of Class Formative Assessments
Exit Slips
Exit Slips are a way for the teacher to know how the lesson went and what they should follow up on. The teacher poses a question, the students write responses, and then the students turn them in before the leave. You can have them write answers on a notecard, have them type their answers, or have them write them on a sheet you provide. Sometimes teachers format them as Tweets to encourage brevity. If you want templates for exit slips, check out this 20 page handout from the Massachusetts Teachers Association– by my count they have over 50 different exit slips templates and they are all super excellent. Randomly, Canva also has a lot of free, downloadable templates you can use too.
There are several types of questions teachers can ask.
Type 1: About learning
Here you ask the students what they learned or ask them a specific question based on your instruction. Sometimes people ask “What was new for you today?” or “What did you already know?” Others ask, “What did you learn today?” or “What stuck with you today?”
Type 2: About the process of learning
Here you ask students about what questions they still have, what they are still confused about, or what they want to know more about. You can also ask how they will apply this content to their own lives or to a new situation.
Type 3: About the instruction
Here you ask students to give feedback. Ask them about a particular instructional strategy that you tried, what they think could have been improved about the lesson, or what instructional activity they enjoyed. You can also ask them to rate the class.
Type 4: About the student
These prompts ask the students to self-reflect. Questions include “How hard did you work today?” “What could you have done in class to help yourself learn?” and so on.
3-2-1 Format
One way to structure the exit slip is with a 3-2-1 format. Here you ask the students to write three things they learned, two things they found interesting, and one thing they still have questions about. You can also change the 3-2-1 to match what you want to know (like 3 things you learned, 2 questions you have, and 1 way class could be improved)
Six word memoirs
Have students each come up with six words to summarize the lesson.
Mind-maps
At the end of class give students a few minutes to create a graphic organizer about what they learned. They can construct it in any fashion, but the goal is for them to organize and see connections between the concepts. You can also do this at the end of the unit to encourage them to zoom out from an individual lesson and to see the structure of the unit.
Quick Writes
Timed writing activities are one of the best ways to build writing fluency. They can also be used to help students process the content of a class. Here you would pose a question about the class (even something as bland as “What did you learn today?” works) and give students one minute to write as much as they possibly can on the topic. To make it a writing fluency building activity, have them count their words at the end and set a goal for number of words written before they start. To make it a community building activity, have them share what they wrote. You can also make it a two part activity with question one being what did you learn and two being what are you still confused about. The activity gets their brains going and takes very little time.
Word Splash
Option 1: Give students a selection of key words from the lesson. They need to write or say a summary of the lesson using those words. Option 2: Have students generate a list of important words from the lesson and then pick one word to use in a sentence summarizing the lesson.
Give One, Get One
This is a collaborative review strategy. Each student writes down a take away they had from the lesson. Then, they find a partner and “give” an insight and “get” an insight. You can have them write it down or do it orally. You can do just one partnering or multiple– and you can collect their takeaways at the end to keep track of what students got out of the lesson!
