Assessment should be a collaborative, reflective process. It should not be viewed as something the teacher does to the students. If this is true for learning, it is also true for assessment. Collaboration means students sometimes help select what they want evaluated. When students, teacher, and parents collaborate on evaluation, the responsibility is shared, as it should be.
Effective assessment is multidimensional.
Quality assessment should use several different tasks, such as samples of writing, student retellings, records of independent reading, self-evaluations, and checklists. In making these choices, you need to trust your own intuition based on your knowledge and observations about students. More formal types of assessments have proclaimed their validity and reliability using various statistical procedures. Assessment should be developmentally and culturally appropriate. We know children develop literacy and their ability to construct meaning by 'trying out' their reading and writing and making approximations.