Effective educators create assessment driven instructional activities that reflect the content and standards students should know. By building from the assessment activity backwards, educators can create logically sequenced instructional activities that are meaningful in regards to what students should know. In this way, pointless activities that provide little to no educational value can be avoided. Moreover, the central ideas of these lessons should be cross-disciplinary. Nonetheless, content alone does not make for effective lesson planning, as planning and preparation should take students' needs and learning styles into account as well. This involves assessing students prior knowledge in order to account for strengths, weaknesses, and misconceptions that they may have. Likewise, getting to know each student's unique learning style can be useful to know which types of assessments and learning activities will be most effective. Overall, using this knowledge, appropriate lesson plans can be constructed that reflect both the academic criteria from state standards and students' current needs.