A five-minute check for understanding from any lesson

A lesson can look as if it went well and still leave many pupils confused. The DfE's framework for new teachers in England says good assessment helps you avoid being 'over-influenced by potentially misleading factors, such as how busy pupils appear'. A five-minute check at the end of the lesson gives you better evidence. This article shows how to write three to five questions for any lesson, run them so every pupil answers and use the answers next lesson.

What the check is for

A check for understanding is formative assessment. The EEF defines this as activities that give teachers information about pupils' understanding but do not count towards formal evaluations or grades. Dylan Wiliam's five key strategies of formative assessment include 'eliciting evidence of learning'. The EEF's feedback guidance says teachers need this evidence before they give feedback.

Decide first what the answers will change. The DfE framework says that before using any assessment, teachers should be clear 'about the decision it will be used to support'. At the end of a lesson, that decision is usually how to start the next one: re-teach, practise or move on.

Asking 'Any questions?' is not a check. In the research Barak Rosenshine summarised, less effective teachers asked it and, when no questions came, assumed the class had learned the material.

Write three to five questions that expose thinking

Wiliam puts the aim like this:

His example comes from primary science. Children who decide whether something is alive by whether it moves will answer correctly about rocks, cats and birds. They will go wrong on buses, trees and grass, so those are the ones to ask about.

A useful shape for the check:

• One hinge-style question. A multiple-choice question on the lesson's key idea, where each wrong answer points to a known misconception. The DfE framework suggests using 'common misconceptions within multiple-choice questions'.
• Two or three short-answer questions. Keep the answers to a word or a number. Wiliam notes that if each of 30 pupils writes more than three words on a mini-whiteboard, you have over 100 words to read.
• One 'explain why' question. The DfE framework suggests prompting pupils to elaborate, to check that a correct answer 'stems from secure understanding'.

Here is a complete check for a Year 7 English lesson on adverbs. Wiliam notes that pupils who treat every word ending in -ly as an adverb go wrong on words such as 'lovely'.

1. How many adverbs are in this sentence: 'The friendly dog barked loudly.' A: one. B: two. C: none.
2. Write down the adverb in 'She rarely finishes her homework.'
3. Turn the adjective 'careful' into an adverb.
4. Explain why 'friendly' is not an adverb in 'the friendly dog'.

The answer to question 1 is A. A pupil who chooses B is applying the -ly rule; one who chooses C may not yet know what an adverb does.

The same shape works in other subjects:

• Year 5 maths: ask which is largest: 0.4, 0.45 or 0.375. The answer is 0.45. Choosing 0.375 suggests the pupil thinks longer decimals are larger; choosing 0.4 suggests the opposite rule.
• Year 8 French: ask which word fills the gap in ___ pomme: le, la, les or l'. Each wrong choice points to a different rule: gender, the plural or words that begin with a vowel.
• Year 10 computing: ask what binary 1010 is in denary: 10, 1010, 5 or 2. The wrong answers come from reading it as denary, reversing the place values and adding the digits.

Run it so that every pupil answers

Volunteers tell you about volunteers. Wiliam argues that the usual routine 'makes participation voluntary'. He adds that deciding what to do next from the answers of one or two pupils 'is unlikely to be a recipe for success'.

Show the multiple-choice question on the board. Every pupil holds up an answer at the same moment, on your signal, on a mini-whiteboard or an A, B, C, D card. The EEF's feedback guidance suggests mini-whiteboards and true or false cards for quick whole-class checks.

The other questions go on a slip that pupils hand in as they leave. Wiliam calls these 'exit passes'; they are also called exit tickets. Anonymous slips tell you where to start the next lesson; named slips also let you regroup pupils.

A workable timing is one minute for the multiple-choice question, three for the slip and one to collect. Harry Fletcher-Wood describes an exit ticket as a 3 to 5 minute task that should be 'swift to answer' and 'swift to mark'.

Sort the answers and plan the next lesson

Sort the slips into three piles: got it, nearly, not yet. Fletcher-Wood calls the routine divide, dig and decide: split the slips, dig through the weaker piles for patterns, then decide what to do. He suggests it cannot take more than fifteen minutes if you do it every lesson.

If many pupils choose the same wrong option, that is one misconception to re-teach. The DfE framework asks teachers to prioritise errors 'related to misunderstandings, rather than careless mistakes'.

The EEF's Check. Adapt. tool (2026), which sits alongside its feedback guidance, offers a menu of responses in three rows:

• Most misunderstand: pause and fix. Re-teach rather than repeat: explain differently, use new examples and address the misconception directly.
• Some are unsure: adapt support. Add scaffolding, such as an example or a checklist, or link the idea to what pupils already know.
• Most understand: extend and support. Ask for reasoning, use peer teaching or build links across topics.

With named slips, Wiliam suggests seating pupils with significant misunderstandings together next lesson and working with them while others do extension work. A week or two later, reuse the hardest question in a quiz. The DfE framework notes that retrieval and spaced practice are likely to strengthen recall.

One check is one snapshot. Fletcher-Wood notes that exit tickets offer little indication of what pupils will remember. The DfE framework advises drawing conclusions from patterns across a number of assessments.

What the evidence says, and what it does not

The EEF's Teaching and Learning Toolkit rates feedback as 'high impact for very low cost based on extensive evidence'. Based on 155 studies, it estimates that pupils who receive feedback make six months' additional progress on average, compared with similar pupils who do not. The estimates are seven months for primary and five months for secondary pupils. The Toolkit also notes a wide range of effects, and that some studies show feedback making things worse.

The EEF also tested a whole-school programme built on these ideas: Embedding Formative Assessment, designed by Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy. In a trial with 140 secondary schools in England, 70 were given the two-year programme. Their pupils made the equivalent of two months' additional progress in Attainment 8 GCSE scores, compared with pupils in the other 70 schools. The EEF gives this result a very high security rating.

The evaluators put the effect size at 0.10, 'roughly equivalent to an improvement of one GCSE grade in one subject'. They found no evidence that the programme improved English or maths GCSE attainment specifically.

Neither finding tests a five-minute check on its own. The trial tested two years of professional development, and the EEF's guidance says there 'may be limited evidence for the use of specific strategies'. Treat the check as a sensible routine within formative assessment, not as a proven intervention in itself.

Try it on Monday

1. Choose one lesson next week and write its key idea as a single sentence.
2. List the mistakes pupils most often make with that idea, with a colleague if you can.
3. Write one multiple-choice question where each wrong answer matches a mistake on your list.
4. Add two short-answer questions and one 'explain why' question on quarter-page slips.
5. Five minutes before the end, show the multiple-choice question and have everyone hold up an answer on your signal.
6. Collect the slips at the door and sort them into three piles.
7. Open the next lesson with what the piles tell you: re-teach, regroup or move on.