Ongoing assessment also keeps students abreast of their progress and determines whether they are benefiting from instruction; if the assessment indicates little or no progress, then instruction needs to be adjusted.
The assessment battery can be a combination of formal measures, such as commercial assessment tools, and informal approaches such as interviews, checklists, anecdotal records, observation, conferencing, demonstration activities, miscue analysis, portfolio assessment, learning self-assessment guides, peer assessment, and writing samples. The findings indicate that the respondents use a battery of formal and informal measures, with higher percentage of the respondents using informal approaches to inform instruction, in comparison to formal measures. A total of 92 percent of the respondents use commercial tools for initial assessment and 72 percent for on-going assessment. In comparison, 99 percent of the respondents use informal approaches for initial assessment and 98 percent for on-going
Informal approaches have the potential to unveil the complicated realities of learning. Observation, for example, can be a very powerful assessment tool. Let's say you notice that a student prefers to "stick to the facts" rather than "read between the lines." Informal approaches allow educators to interact with the student to explore this phenomenon at a deeper level. Commercial assessments, on the other hand, would have a straightforward answer to this phenomenon: the student needs instruction in making inferences. However, through informal approaches such as conferencing, you might discover that the student does not realize he/she can exert power over the text and make inferences. Conversations with students about "reading the lines" and "reading between the lines" can help educators to understand the degree of power that students assert over the text
Some of the informal approaches were used by the majority of the respondents, while others were not. For example, 80 percent of the respondents engaged in observation for on-going assessment, while peer assessment was used by only 16 percent of the respondents (see Figure 4).