How do you know if your pupils have learned something you’ve taught them? It may seem like a simple question, but the techniques you use to discover what pupils understand will make a big difference to their learning.

In my experience, checking for understanding (CFU) is one of the most commonly used techniques, but it’s also often misunderstood, misused or underused.

Over the years, I have researched the technique extensively and honed my own practice on it. Here’s what I discovered.

What is checking for understanding?

CFU is a type of formative assessment. Put simply, it involves a teacher stopping regularly to check whether pupils have grasped what they’ve been taught.

Following the check, the teacher can judge whether it’s time to move on to the next stage of the learning sequence, or whether re-teaching is required.

Why is it so important?

Research cited by Barak Rosenshine, who popularised the term in his 10 principles of instruction, found that effective teachers frequently checked to see if all the pupils were learning the new material.

These checks provided some of the processing needed to move new learning into long-term memory, and also let teachers know if pupils were developing misconceptions.

According to Rosenshine, more effective teachers use CFU to gain quick and accurate information on where pupils are with their learning. But he also highlights how CFU in the form of low-stakes quizzing can provide the added benefit of retrieval practice.

Don’t all teachers already do this?

Checking whether all pupils have actually grasped a concept is more difficult than we might think.

As Coe et al. (2020) note: “Asking meaningful and appropriate questions that target essential learning, collecting and interpreting a response from every student, and responding to the results, all in real-time in the flow of a lesson, is hard to do well.”

Imagine a Year 4 teacher who wants to find out if all 30 pupils really understand the difference between fractions and decimals.

They could take their books in to mark, to spot individual errors. They could wait for the Friday test, to scrutinise their scores. But the best teachers are more likely to check for understanding during classes, to allow them to address misconceptions in the moment.

As Coe et al point out, however, CFU is “hard to do well”. So, what makes it so tricky?

What can go wrong when checking for understanding?

According to author and education consultant Tom Sherrington, the number one weakness he sees when observing lessons is teachers relying “too heavily on collective responses and a generalised sense of student success rate without consciously and deliberately attending to each and every individual”.

What might ineffective checking for understanding look like?

The first classic example of substandard CFU is when teachers ask generalised questions of the class, like: “Does everyone get that? Shall we continue?”

Pupils understandably interpret this as a rhetorical question, in which the teacher is looking for tacit approval to move on to something else, rather than offering an opportunity to request clarification.

Similarly, the immortal phrase “Does anybody have any questions?” is unlikely to help a teacher find out what struggling pupils don’t understand.

As research by Ruth Butler, a professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem School of Education, has shown, “pupils often avoid asking for needed help because help-seeking can be interpreted as evidence of inadequate ability”.

When no questions are forthcoming, a teacher will be mistakenly assured that understanding is universal. Yet, the real reason that pupils don’t ask for further explanation is usually because they worry it will make them look stupid in front of their peers.

Third, teachers frequently fall into the trap of believing that correct answers from a small number of pupils indicate that the whole class has a confident grasp of the material.

All too often, these answers are volunteered by the academic high-flyers. As Sherrington cautions, “teachers assume that students will hear the correct answers and self-edit accordingly, but that doesn’t necessarily happen”, especially for pupils who struggle.

How can teachers optimise checking for understanding?

Instead of hopeful enquiries and assumptions about pupil understanding, effective CFU demands a more thorough approach. Strategies that help teachers find out if pupils really get it include:

1. Give them mini-whiteboards

Want to know what every pupil is thinking immediately? Ask them to write down an answer or explanation and get them all to show you.

2. Use choral response

Pupils tend to be influenced by their peers’ answers. “If Jemma says it’s that, then I’m going to say the same!” By getting pupils to verbalise their answers simultaneously, however, you can detect differences in understanding more accurately.

3. Make cold calling the default questioning strategy

Rather than relying on the answers of volunteers, develop a classroom environment where all pupils can expect to be called upon. Through gaining a wider sample of answers, you’ll be able to gain a deeper awareness about the understanding of more reticent pupils.

4. Bounce responses onto other pupils

Instead of stopping at the first correct answer, check understanding further by asking a range of other pupils what they think. Questions like “Do you agree?” and “Can you develop that further?” also activate deeper thinking among all pupils.

5. Check constantly during circulation

Looking for patterns across the room during circulation is a crucial step in enabling a teacher to quickly address errors and misconceptions.

Teachers and authors Michael Feely and Ben Karlin term this “monitoring for understanding”. They recommend that when “an error is limited to one or two students” a private word is appropriate. But with evidence of widespread misunderstandings, re-teaching will be necessary.

6. Hand out Post-it Notes for questions

To avoid pupils having to publicly admit to knowledge gaps, give them all a Post-it Note and ask them all to write down an anonymous question about a topic that they don’t understand. Invariably, pupils ask similar questions, which provides a clear indication that you need to re-teach something.

7. Beware verbatim responses

We might assume that a word-perfect answer to our question is a clear sign of understanding. But, as associate dean at Ambition Institute Sarah Cottinghatt argues, pupils may have just committed the teacher’s phrase to memory, rather than truly comprehending the meaning.

As a result, she advises to “check for meaning” through more probing follow-up questions and tasks.

Extending and improving our CFU strategies enables us to address errors and misconceptions rapidly, preventing them from becoming embedded. By interrogating responses and displaying greater curiosity about how pupils arrive at a particular answer, we can move pupils towards deeper learning.

Mark Roberts is director of research and English teacher at Carrickfergus Grammar School in Northern Ireland

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