Interim Assessments: Useful Enough?
Weighing investments of time and money against instructional utility
This is the second in a series of posts by our 2025 summer interns, based on the projects they designed with their Center mentors. Nicolás Buchbinder, a doctoral student at the University of Colorado-Boulder, worked with Principal Learning Associate Scott Marion.
There’s no such thing as a yes/no decision when evaluating an assessment’s instructional usefulness—that’s something that will stick with me from my summer internship at the Center.
Center authors have emphasized this idea in blogs (see here and here) and it’s clear in Carla Evans and Scott Marion’s book. Instructional usefulness should be thought of as a continuum, in which some assessments—those that enable substantive insights about student thinking, misconceptions, and strengths—place in the higher end, while others, such as state summative assessments, place in the lower end.
However, thinking in terms of continua can also be misleading. Even if we can distinguish the ends of the continuum easily, assessments that we might place in the middle might be used to make some instructional decisions; we’re not sure if the juice is worth the squeeze.
Interim assessments occupy this curious middle ground. Interim assessments are administered multiple times a year and entail a significant investment from states, districts, and schools. We must weigh the opportunity costs associated with administering the interim assessment against any potential benefits.
Time, Money and Instructional Usefulness
It’s not just the money; it’s also the time that students spend taking assessments and educators spend analyzing the reports. If informing instruction is the purpose, we should be asking whether the interim assessment is instructionally useful enough to merit the (time and money) investment.
When might an interim assessment be instructionally useful enough for the investment to make sense? If the main goal for the assessment is to provide instructionally useful insights, then educators should get more information to guide instruction than what they get from, say, state assessments.
Most state assessments provide an end-of-year score that can be used to identify students who struggled with the content more than others, or maybe to form groups of students within a class for the beginning of the next year, based on their performance on a particular subdomain. Some state assessments are administered more than once during the academic year, allowing for updating those decisions. If a state assessment can provide this information, then interim assessments should provide much more.
Teachers’ Use of i-Ready Diagnostic
During my summer internship, my fellow intern Daniel Raphael and I, guided by Scott Marion, explored how educators interpreted score reports from a popular interim assessment, Curriculum Associates’ i-Ready Diagnostic, and used them to inform their instruction. To do this, we conducted 90-minute interviews with 14 educators across the country.
Some of the findings of this project reflected the literature on uses of interim assessments. For example, we saw that most educators were not able to reach the kinds of substantive insights about student thinking that characterize formative assessment. In fact, several teachers distinguished the kinds of specific insights they gained from analyzing student work from the “bigger picture” that the i-Ready Diagnostic reports offered.
Educators told us how they used the information from the reports to group students and give them more tailored instruction and practice, and to place students in specific intensive supports. But it was also clear from the interviews that they rarely relied solely on i-Ready to make those decisions, and would frequently use other contextual information and performance on other assessments to define who would be in each grouping or receive each type of support.
While educators valued i-Ready and explained how the information helped them make these decisions, in most cases they were unable to pinpoint exactly what information the interim assessment added to the information they already had available from state and classroom assessments.
Finding Value in the Tests
However, we still saw some teachers using the information in ways that added value and seemed to move the needle further toward instructional usefulness. For instance, a few educators were able to use disaggregated score reports to connect the performance of students in the Diagnostic to the content sequence in their curriculum. One educator told us how she used the standard-level reporting to understand which students required specific support before class so they could effectively participate in the upcoming instruction, and that she could use materials available in the i-Ready platform to provide said support.
Even if these insights were not substantive as defined in the literature (Evans and Marion, 2024; Shepard et al., 2011), they helped educators narrow their focus. They could then use more targeted classroom assessments to reach deeper insights. It could be argued that highly-skilled educators could accomplish the same objective by using their classroom assessments alone, but assessments like i-Ready could provide ways to help educators get there for many students more quickly and efficiently than having to look for or design a set of assessments to achieve a similar objective.
So, is i-Ready instructionally useful enough? I am not entirely sure. To be fair, this was a small-scale study and likely not representative of the average i-Ready user—we talked to those considered sophisticated users. In addition, it is difficult to evaluate the utility of an instrument like i-Ready when the organizational structures that favor data utilization vary so much across schools and districts.
However, after talking to these educators, I believe we can place the instructional usefulness of i-Ready closer to the middle of the continuum that the literature that we read in preparation for this research project has established for interim assessments in general.
Conditions Matter for Interim Assessment Use
I want to emphasize that there are some important conditions that must be met to reach the more sophisticated uses that we identified. In essence, the ingredients are:
- fine-grain score reporting at the skill- or standard-level,
- a strong and explicit alignment between the assessment (and its score reports) and curriculum,
- a content sequence that allows educators to see the necessary prerequisites to help students be prepared for the next lesson in the curriculum, and
- good availability of instructional materials that educators can use with students.
Achieving these conditions is only partially about the assessment itself, and may be more about the curriculum. This is probably the reason why we observed these more sophisticated uses mostly in schools that not only used the i-Ready Diagnostic but also used Curriculum Associates’ curriculum products.
I don’t think it is impossible for an interim assessment to be instructionally useful without such an explicit connection between the curriculum and assessment, but if they aren’t connected that way, there must be some backbone, such as learning standards arranged in a common sequence. The existence of that backbone might not be enough, and specific training and support structures for educators to work on those connections are likely required.
If this alignment is absent, it is probably wiser for schools and districts to focus on other uses for interim assessments, such as their predictive and evaluative uses. It might still be worth using them for these other purposes, but users should be clear about the purpose they aim to serve. Achieving this clarity can help us locate each type of assessment on the usefulness continuum based on the purposes that it is designed to achieve, getting us closer to achieving more balanced assessment systems.
Photo by Allison Shelley for EDUimages