• Effective teachers assess both student learning and their own professional learning. New teachers struggle with both types of assessment.
• Student assessment. Most new teachers have a limited repertoire of assessing strategies and few prior experiences with alternative assessment.1  Even maintaining student grades (in a gradebook or with grading software) is an unknown quantity to first-year teachers and is rarely taught in college methods courses or new teacher inservice training. Novice teachers must explore formal and informal measures of learning and practice constructing various assessments.
• Most new teachers only have experience with the assessment measures that their teachers used when they were students: multiple choice, true/false, and short-answer essay tests. Assessing strategies, like instructing strategies, require a range of options to reflect students' diverse learning abilities—from rubrics that provide standards against which students can measure their work to portfolios that include pre- and post-activity student writing.
• Self-assessment. Teachers rarely receive ongoing feedback about their teaching. Accurate feedback is a crucial component of instructional change, but teachers are dependent on others to supply the necessary data to answer the question, How am I doing? The typical teacher observation model, in which an administrator observes a teacher in his or her classroom a few times a year, leaves much to be desired.
• Assessing oneself as a teacher is a highly inexact science. Teachers can glean information from a variety of sources, including student feedback and technology—audiotaping a class and then analyzing the lesson