This contribution addresses the theme of technology for formative assessment, with a special focus on the the ways technology, in terms of devices and digital resources, may support formative assessment strategies (Black & Wiliam, 2009) in whole class activities.

The contribution stems from a designed-based research (DBRC, 2003) carried out within the European project FaSMEd, which addresses the issue of technologically enhanced formative assessment methods.

Within the project, our team chose a connected classroom technology through which students may share their productions, opinions and reflections with their classmates and the teacher during or at the end of a mathematical activity. We designed and implemented specific digital worksheets that can be sent (from teacher to students and viceversa) and displayed (on the students tablets, on the teacher's computer or on the IWB) to enhance effective classroom discussions (Cusi, Morselli and Sabena, 2016).

Within FaSMEd, we have developed a three-dimensional framework, which extends Wiliam and Thompson's (2007) model of FA, taking into account the two dimensions already included in this model (formative assessment strategies and the agents activating such strategies), and adds a further dimension aimed at highlighting the role of technology in supporting FA processes: the functionalities of technology (Aldon et alii, 2017).

The connected classroom technology we used during our design experiments enables, in particular, to create polls, submit them to the students, gather the answers and show the results (both individual answers and cluster ones) in real time. This specific function of the CCT can be included within the “processing and analysing” functionality of technology, which refers to the ways in which technology supports the processing and the analysis of the data collected during the lessons.

To support the use of this function during whole classroom activities, we designed specific worksheets aimed at prompting polls between proposed options: the Poll worksheets.

In this paper we discuss, in relation to the FaSMEd framework, how the polls can be used, during classroom activities to foster the activation of FA strategies. In particular, we discuss the use of instant polls and the design and implementation of Poll worksheets as starting points for classroom discussions.

Thanks to the analysis we identify patterns that characterise the fruitful use of the poll tool and of poll worksheets for formative assessment. A detailed analysis of paradigm examples will be provided in the extended paper.