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Exit tickets or exit slips are a simple, low-stress tool for conducting formative assessments with students.
Put simply, they help you understand what your students have understood from your lessons.
They work in a few ways:
Typically a teacher will provide a question at the end of class for students to respond to before leaving. Students respond on either a piece of paper or using a digital exit ticket tool.
Exit tickets should take no more than 5 minutes to complete, with between 1-3 questions. Using a mixture of response types, including both qualitative and quantitative content can give you a better understanding of the class as a whole and the challenges faced by individual students.
For example, you might ask:
“How well did you understand today’s lesson (Scale of 1 -7)”
Followed by:
“What is one thing you'd like me to explain more clearly?”
Where teachers use paper exit tickets, the questions are typically determined ahead of the class and printed onto individual pieces of paper, or shown on the board at the front of the class whilst students write on pieces of paper. At the end of the class, students will hand back the paper to the teacher.
Exit tickets provide a number of helpful benefits for teachers and students.
They have been found to improve behavior and academic achievement by helping student make connections between new and existing information, and identify with their classmates and teacher.
In one study, researchers found that exit tickets elicited a high level of honesty from students and enabled teachers to recognize students who needed additional support. Teachers identified that students felt heard and shared ownership of their learning.
Besides enabling students to feel heard, exit tickets:
Need more convincing? Here are more reasons to use exit tickets in your classroom with links to research that backs up the benefits.
The 3-2-1 exit ticket format gets students to list 3 things they learned in the lesson, 2 things they liked about the lesson, and 1 question they still have about the lesson.
Benefits:
💡 Bonus: See this guide on how to ask great 3-2-1 exit ticket questions which covers examples for math and science, social studies, HASS, and reading and grammar.
Formative assessment exit tickets will give you a fast, reliable view of who "got" the lesson and who needs more help, both at the class-wide and individual level.
They are a low-stakes method of assessment, focusing on checking for understanding rather than recording a grade.
They are also perfect for teacher planning: are you moving through the content too fast? Do you need to shake up the homework for next week? Instead of waiting until the end of the term, you can adjust quickly on the fly.
Here's a lesson activity guide for running formative assessment exit tickets in your classroom.
Lesson reflection exit tickets help teachers understand how well their students have understood what was covered in a lesson.
Rather than focusing on a specific piece of knowledge (as with formative assessment exit tickets), lesson reflection exit tickets instead ask students to reflect on their learning from the lesson.
💡 Bonus: Here's an activity guide for lesson reflections.
Some teachers use exit tickets daily, while others only once or twice a week.
Teachers might use exit tickets at the end of each lesson and use an online quiz at the end of a series of lessons or unit to assess a larger volume of content and/or skills that have been taught.
Once exit tickets become embedded into the culture of the classroom, the process of low-stakes formative assessment can become part of a learning and teaching routine. Students understand they will be expected to reflect on their learning at regular intervals and this routine serves to develop their metacognitive skills.
Using exit tickets with your students is easy. Having a clear plan will help you get the most from the process.
Think about the reason your using exit tickets. The most common use is for formative assessment based on the lesson content.
You might also use the exit ticket format at the start of class as a "bell ringer", as a conversation starter mid-lesson, or for SEL and well being checks.
Identify some key questions based on your objective. This might include questions about the lesson content, or some of our suggested questions below.
If you haven't already used exit tickets with your students, make sure you explain how you will be using them and why. This helps them understand their importance.
You should also consider the mechanism used for collecting exit tickets. Using a tool like Ziplet makes it easy to create, share, collect and analyse exit tickets. It also allows a variety of formats including scale, multiple choice and emoji responses.
Using paper exit tickets and collecting them on the way out the door is a simple but potentially time consuming alternative.
Exit tickets are only helpful when you can gather meaningful insights from them. Set aside some time to review responses. Grouping students according to their answers can make it easier to follow up.
In your Ziplet account all responses are instantly visualised, and responses can be filtered, helping you identify common themes in students responses and follow up with those who need it.
Following up with students lets them know their responses are important.
It also allows you to provide differentiated instruction or support to students who need it most.
Take the time to follow up with students either individually or as a class (where appropriate).
Ziplet let's you reply to students directly or as a group, making it easy to follow up on incorrect answers or pieces of feedback.
This resource covers 35 exit ticket ideas you can use with your students today, including:
Some other exit ticket templates:
To get the most out of your exit tickets, you should ensure that they are:
You can read more about exit ticket best-practice here.
Some teachers use slips of paper to run exit tickets with their students.
However, paper exit tickets aren't ideal in the classroom. Collecting, sorting, and reviewing paper exit tickets is time-consuming for teachers and provides limited anlaysis capabilities.
Digital exit tickets are a much more efficient way to check for understanding and offer other benefits such as:
Ziplet is a free exit ticket tool that enables teachers to run fast student check-ins.
Students can respond using a 6-digit code and don't need accounts.
Ziplet can also be used for:
You can learn more about Ziplet here, or get started with your own free account.
