A new, exciting area of research on classroom assessment is investigating what students’ perceptions are about tests and other assignments, and how these perceptions impact the level of effort exerted, performance, meaningfulness of feedback, and emotional reactions to doing well or poorly, to getting right and wrong answers. Long neglected, we are now beginning to realize that assessment has meaning to students, and their interpretations, anticipations, and emotions that result from the assessment, as well as from feedback they receive, are critical (Leighton, 2019; Lui & Andrade, 2021).

Among these many methods, the one that stands out is classroom assessment; it’s the most powerful type of measurement that influences learning and motivation.

Thinking about teaching as phases that occur before, during, and after instruction is aligned with three major “types” of classroom assessments—preassessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment.

Essentially, we have a “standards-based” educational system in America and many other countries. Standards-based, using commonly accepted objectives for student learning, is now a ubiquitous buzzword in education, if ever there was one. As we’ll see in detail in Chapter 2, standards frame what students should know and do—they formalize and standardize what gets taught and assessed. Every U.S. state has learning standards, with corresponding pacing guides and curriculum at the district level for implementation.