Students need to learn how to assess and improve their own learning. Students need to learn how to think about their work and how to improve it, and teachers need to learn to help them do so. This not only improves students learning in their school subjects, but also helps students acquire valuable tools for lifelong learning. Helping students learn to self-assess is another basic building block of comprehensive assessment. Schools must provide support for teachers to learn from each other so as to improve curriculum, instruction and assessment.
Schools have to create time and space for teachers to collaborate and learn.
The state must help schools obtain resources to provide that time and space and should provide support for schools to be able to help teachers learn. It also can be very useful for teachers from different schools to meet and help each other. Unless it is to be very intrusive and extremely expensive, the kinds of information that can be gathered about hundreds or thousands of students by a district or the state can only be very limited, thin, not helpful to use in the classroom with the specific student. A really Comprehensive Assessment System, therefore, cannot be created and maintained by the state, but must be local and particular and inevitably varied. Students and their parents and their teachers need to know how students are doing.