Assessments are a crucial part of educational planning both for direct instruction of students and for education leadership. The problem is that assessments often do not serve the needs of administrators and educators in the same way.

Administrators need generalized information for system efficiency analysis. This usually means that districts or schools mandate assessments that are conducted as events so they can gather the systems information they need. Often these assessments are seen as limited use to student learning because they are summative in nature. This means that assessment granularity is often lost. Areas of learning are tabulated and reported as a score but information such as the students answer for a specific question is not retained. Information such as the reason a student received a low or a high score in certain sections or for a particular question cannot be analyzed for instructional purposes by learning support staff or future teachers. The solution to gather information needed for instructional planning based on these types of assessments is to re-assess the student to determine the specific characteristic of each learning goal. Ultimately, the student is assessed again and again to confirm hunches on performance characteristics.

Teacher preferred assessments inform instruction and either support or force a re-evaluation of instructional direction. These types of assessments give educators a clear view of the specific information they need to know about individual learners and the learning needs of the class. Teachers mark these assessments and through that process they are able to detect themes that reach beyond a simple right or wrong answer. The main issue then is that this granularity of information stays with that teacher. As a result, future teachers lose access to the specifics of an assessment. Students do not benefit from future teachers being able to pickup where the previous teacher left off because the future teacher has to run new assessments to orient their instructional planning. Ultimately, the new teacher learns what they need to know about their students, but before and during the time it takes to re-assess students, teachers are not able to access this type of information which means their effectiveness is reduced until they can orient themselves to the characteristics of the individual learners.