Melding together these different types of assessment is important in coming to understand what students know and are able to do. Skill tests assess students' knowledge of important facts, routines, or algorithms. The tasks do not require conceptual or strategic decisions. Skill tasks allow the assessment of students' factual and procedural abilities without mixing them with other abilities.
Conceptual tasks call for students to represent, use and or explain a concept.
They require a student to use an idea, reformulate it, express in their own words. Conceptual understanding tasks make little or no procedural, or strategic demands on the student. Mathematical problem solving tasks require the formulation of an approach, selection of procedures, concepts, and strategies, use of these to obtain a solution, and drawing a conclusion. Problem solving tasks make demands on students procedural and conceptual understanding assessing the way in which students have absorbed and are able to use skills and concepts. Individual procedural, conceptual, and problem-solving tasks provide a balanced yet separate assessments of student capabilities.