Clarifying What Makes Assessment Instructionally Useful

Let’s get more specific about how to use assessment results

Education leaders are constantly being asked to make coherent decisions in an incoherent environment.

I’ve been thinking a lot about assessment terminology and how important nuances get lost in attractive phrasing. And I’m worried that these losses can undermine the clarity we need about the purposes and uses of assessment information.

I’ve been reflecting on this since the National Conference on Student Assessment in June, where I listened to assessment designers, researchers and users talk about the importance of getting “instructionally useful” information from assessments. In those same conversations, I heard assessments described as formative, with the assumption that if an assessment is called instructionally useful, then it also can be labeled as formative, in spite of not aligning with the rich formative assessment research base. 

For years now, colleagues at the Center have been urging greater specificity in how we talk about the uses of assessment results. Nathan Dadey’s 2018 blog makes the case; In their 2024 book, Understanding Instructionally Useful Assessment (and this blog), Carla Evans and Scott Marion outline 10 assessment design and implementation features, and argue that when more of these features (e.g., constructed not selected student responses, rich tasks, timely and tightly connected to recent instruction etc.) are present in an assessment, it is more likely to yield information that teachers can use to directly inform next instructional steps. 

Why Shared Understanding of Assessment Claims Matters

Now it’s my turn on the definitional soapbox. 

Shared understanding about assessment claims is critical. For example, a principal might learn that a newly adopted middle school mathematics assessment program has been marketed as instructionally useful. The principal is delighted, assuming that the teachers will receive frequent, fine-grained assessment information that will inform day-to-day instructional adjustments. 

But she is disappointed when she realizes that it will be administered only a few times a year, to identify students who need additional support before high school algebra. To avoid this mismatch in expectations, assessment users should demand much more specificity—before they buy or design an assessment—about the actions that assessment can support. 

So when you hear the term “instructionally useful,” consider which of these things the assessment is actually built to do:

1. Inform immediate next instructional steps: Formative assessment practices provide teachers with an ongoing stream of evidence about student learning that allows them to make fine-grained adjustments to the teaching and learning in the classroom in real time.
   
   For example, a teacher might decide to dwell longer in a productive class discussion that is undercovering some areas of confusion, or make decisions about how to group students with varied strengths to discuss their essays, She might decide to change up the entrance ticket for the next lesson to get more targeted information or to provide additional opportunity to grapple with a concept that students don’t quite understand yet. This stream of evidence is continuous, since every lesson provides opportunities for teachers to attend to what students say, write, do or make, and to interpret that information in the light of the learning goals to understand how student thinking is developing.

2. Support remediation and reteaching: There is an important difference between the first example and this one. Here the use of assessment information occurs primarily after an instructional opportunity has passed and a teacher recognizes that students have not yet fully grasped some important ideas, so he will engage either in reteaching (during a regular class period) or remediation (during an intervention/extension period). To the degree that learning can be supported during instruction, this need for remediation/reteaching is reduced. 

3. Inform future instruction of the same students: A teacher might also use assessment information to identify places where students need additional opportunities to consolidate their understanding of certain concepts or ideas. But rather than have students engage in a stand-alone remediation learning opportunity, she elects to incorporate the learning opportunity into an upcoming unit. 

4. Guide future instruction of different students: Assessment information can be used as part of a teacher’s or a team’s reflection on an instructional unit or set of units that have just been completed. Identifying areas of students’ understanding that did not fully match the intended learning goals for that unit may inform how that unit is taught in the future. The data and associated reflections can impact future implementation of a unit for next year’s students.

5. Inform curriculum revision: A teacher’s or team’s reflection on assessment data tied to one or more units may result in a more significant adjustment, not just to how a unit is taught but to the curriculum materials used during a unit. The assessment data may suggest some significant gaps in student learning that require different materials than those currently available to teach to the breadth of the standards. This is an iterative process—teachers can inspect the next round of assessment data to inform their discussion about whether the implemented changes brought about the anticipated changes to student learning or if additional changes are needed.

6. Help corroborate or calibrate teacher judgement: Assessment data from external assessments can help a teacher reflect on his own classroom judgments and recalibrate the rigor of their instructional expectations if necessary. If a teacher believes, from classroom assessment evidence, that the majority of his students are on track to meet grade-level expectations but external evidence does not support that, he may need to reflect on his understanding of the standards and what proficiency looks like, assuming that the external assessment is a reasonable reflection of the standards. Such reflections will not immediately impact day-to-day instruction, but will help a teacher align their expectations of instructional rigor over time. 

7. Signal what is important: Assessment informs curriculum choices, so this one is a bit of a double-edged sword: An assessment can signal what is important or what is valued instructionally, but when assessments focus on discrete, disconnected skills, instruction also often emphasizes those aspects of learning, and the curriculum may narrow. Given the instructional and assessment pressures on teachers, they often need to make choices about what to emphasize. When assessments require students to engage in higher order thinking—to write, to draw on ideas and concepts across multiple standards—then instruction will also emphasize these aspects of learning. 

When I hear someone say “instructionally useful,” I assume they’re referring to #1 in my list. Most of these other actions would not fall within the definition of instructionally useful provided by Carla and Scott. When assessment developers use “instructionally useful” as a broad catch-all category, it can cause confusion. To teachers, that phrase suggests the assessment will be “immediately useful for what I’m going to do next,” when that might not be what the developer had in mind—or what the test was designed to do.

I urge our assessment community to be much more specific in our articulations of what assessment information can be used for, and avoid obfuscating with broad phrasing. Designers and vendors should be precise in their claims about what their assessment data should—and should not—be used for. School and district leaders should also feel empowered to ask targeted follow-up questions rather than accept the phrase “instructionally useful” at face value and risk sending mixed messages to teachers and students.

Photo by Allison Shelley/The Verbatim Agency for EDUimages