The role of assessment in elementary education has many roles. First, it is used to identify what students know and how much they know. Assessment is used to identify areas that students are struggling with. Teachers can analyze the data they collect from evaluations and see if there is a trend in student deficits in learning. This may lead them to identify an area that they didn’t teach very well and need to go back and re-teach or use a different approach to explain it in the future. Assessment shows teachers and students what students can do and how well they can do it. In some cases, it can diagnose learning disabilities.
Formative assessment can be instrumental in elementary education because it gives teachers a timely response to how students are doing with specific material. Formative assessment can also be used to show teachers how students feel about their work. For example, in a math class, a teacher can ask for a hand signal to check in with student comprehension at that moment. It allows students to check in with their understanding and enables the teacher insight into what they may need to explain for more clarity. Overall, assessment is used to improve student learning.