As teachers, we need to monitor our students' progress every day, week, quarter, and year. Classroom assessments are one of the most crucial teaching tools for teachers. When assessments are developed and interpreted correctly, they can help teachers better understand their students' progress and learning needs, providing the resources to gather evidence that indicates what information their students know and what skills they can acquire. Assessments help teachers not only identify and monitor students' strengths, weaknesses, learning and progress, but also help them plan and conduct instruction better. For these reasons, continuous classroom assessment is the glue that binds teaching and learning and allows educators to monitor their own effectiveness and student learning. Despite the importance of assessment in education, few teachers receive adequate training in how to design or analyze assessments. For this reason, when teachers are not provided with adequate assessments from their textbooks or teaching resources, teachers construct their own in an unsystematic way. They create essay questions and prompts comparable to those used by their teachers and treat them as assessments to be administered when instructional activities are completed primarily for grading students. To use assessments to improve teaching and student learning, teachers must change their approach to assessments by ensuring they create valid assessments. To ensure their assessments are valid, they must include five basic indicators that can be used as steps to follow when creating assessments. The first of these indicators is the first step a teacher must take when creating a valid assessment... middle of paper ......tml#lessonJohnson, S., & Media, D. (2013). What are raw scores? | The classroom | Synonymous. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from http://classroom.synonym.com/raw-scores-4447.html Munday, J. (2012, June 9). TRIAL TERMS. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from http://www.hishelpinschool.com/testing/test4.htmlPearson, (2013). How standardized tests are created for your child. Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQHoNfdbwMsSchultzkie, L. (2012). Percentiles. Retrieved December 1, 2013, from http://www.regentsprep.org/Regents/math/Algebra/AD6/quartiles.htmStiggins, R., Arter, J., Chappuis, J., Chappuis, S., (2007) . Classroom assessment for student learning: Do it well, use it well. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson.Wormeli, R. (2010). Formative and summative evaluation. Stenhouse Publishers. Retrieved from: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJxFXjfB_B4