"We need to stop thinking of assessment merely as an accountability tool and start using it as a teaching tool." Rick Stiggins

Why do we have assessment? 

Assessment experts will say that we use assessment to guide learning. Assessment is seen as either formative or summative by many experts, while others believe that there is a continuum of assessment that blends both formative and summative together.

We know that there are students who don't do well on tests. Unfortunately that is sometimes due to the adults around them that say they aren't good test takers long before the test is ever dropped in front of them. Other students do well on tests but it doesn't necessarily mean that they ever learned anything new.

Ultimately, high quality assessments should be able to tell us where the student has a weakness and where they have strengths. We call that effective feedback. As we data dive we should be able to use the assessment to help us understand how to better instruct the student, and it should even help us see whether our instruction had a positive or negative impact.

In this guest blog for Finding Common Ground, assessment expert Rick Stiggins writes,

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