Tomlinson suggests that the best ways to make assessments useful are to assess before teaching to know what students know going into a topic, offer appropriate choices so that students have a variety of ways to show their knowledge, provide feedback early and often so students know how to move forward, and encourage self-assessment and reflection so students know how they're doing.
Personally, I don't find as much value in assessing before teaching as the author places on it. In my courses, the topics share common background knowledge and typically build off one another. I typically know students' levels of understanding without a separate pre-assessment. At most, I would give a pre-assessment toward the beginning of each semester. I have found that assessments that are out of context from what I've been covering in class stress students out and cause test anxiety, even when I emphasize that it is not going to be graded, so it does not give me an accurate representation of student knowledge anyway.
I do agree with Tomlinson about the importance of feedback after assessments. When students are given feedback, I have seen them feel empowered to fix mistakes and to deepen their understanding in order to improve because they know where their strengths and deficiencies are. Providing more feedback also helps spur students self-assessing.
Observation is the assessment format that I find easiest to give feedback for, which is one of the reasons it is my most frequently used types of assessment. I also like that I receive feedback quickly, which allows me to alter my lesson on the spot if needed, especially because an informal interview makes it much easier to determine what students know compared to what misconceptions they may have. Observation requires minimal planning, which is good since it happens multiple times in a single class. For my math classes, the planning that is required is mostly creating problems (process tasks) that students will need to solve. The primary issue that observation causes is that it is harder to track progress in a way that could be shown to parents, administration, and other teachers. Being part of a School for Rigor means that this issue has been reduced greatly. We use a tracker that is specifically set up to track the results of observation, and it automatically charts the results in pie graphs.
I would love to explore students using the feedback I provide in a more formal way. If I was more purposeful with students self-assessing, they would be able to internalize the success criteria so that they can analyze errors and check their own work as they go. I like the idea of assessment conferences because it could teach students to advocate for themselves rather than merely accepting the score I give them without having to think about the reason for the score.
Using established criteria helps students know exactly what is expected of them and would help them to self-assess. It is also a crucial aspect to assessing diverse students. If a teacher compares assessment results to other students, it creates a mindset that someone has to "lose" rather than all students being capable. Additionally, diverse students benefit from having a wider range of tasks that have multiple approaches so that a student has the chance to show their understanding of the content in a way that is best for that student.
Some students will benefit from modifications to assessments. Students with disabilities and English Language Learners both benefit from extended time. The extended time could accommodate extra thinking time for ELL students to process what they are being asked to do, and students with disabilities could have breaks built in to their extended time.
Diverse materials can help diverse students as well. It may be useful if students with disabilities have multiple ways to respond to assessments. This could be achieved by having multiple approaches to the assessment because one approach could be paper and pencil while another uses a computer. ELL students could take advantage of dictionaries to help translate and a variety of visual materials so that they don't get hindered by vocabulary if it is not necessary.
These accommodations help assessments achieve their goal: to tell us what the students know, give the teacher and student feedback, and ultimately guide instruction.
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