Classroom Assessment: Minute by Minute, Day by Day In classrooms that use assessment to support learning, teachers continually adapt instruction to meet student needs.

learning. We have to test our students for many reasons. Obviously, such testing should be useful in guiding teaching. Many schools formally test students at the end of a marking period—that is, every 6 to 10 weeks—but the information from such tests is hard to use, for two reasons. First, only a small amount of testing time can be allotted to each standard or skill covered in the marking period. Consequently, the test is better for monitoring overall levels of achievement than for diagnosing specific weaknesses. Second, the information arrives too late to be useful. We can use the results to make broad adjustments to curriculum, such as reteaching or spending more time on a unit, or identifying teachers who appear to be especially successful at teaching particular units. But if educators are serious about using assessment to improve instruction, then we need more fine-grained assessments, and we need to use the information they yield to modify instruction as we teach.