FIAE: Chapter 3

This chapter, three, of Fair Isn't Always Equal provided much more in depth information on accessing student understanding and mastery. It describes the three major types of assessment; pre-assessment, formative assessment, and summative assessment. It also describes the uses of all of these. Pre-assessment is a great tool because it gives you an idea of while students are already advanced in this topic, and which may need assistance, formative is mid-content assessment, which can be used  to determine the success of the lessons and where you should go from there, and summative, of course, captures the end results of the learning. This is all important to know, as it isn't really obvious to students that all of the testing being done on them is, in fact, for the purpose of bettering their chances of gaining the skills necessary to master the content.
In today's classroom, I think assessment is a huge concern. Standardized testing and accountability requirements are making it hard for teachers to cover information in a meaningful way. Because of this, their own assessments are simply catering to the pure memorization of content, rather than actual understanding and obtainment of skills. Finding ways to assess students in ways that promote understanding is really important, as student's need to carry these skills with them through their education and lives, otherwise learning it in the first place is a useless endeavor.