It is useful to distinguish between what students should know — concepts — from what they should be able to do — skills.  The remediation of these two classes of learning goals is often quite different. Testing the two separately can therefore lead to the appropriate remediation of each.  Concepts and skills can be assessed as two parts of a single test, or, if the combined time to take both assessments exceeds a single class period, they can be given as separate tests on different days.

Another advantage of separating concepts from skills occurs when they are graded separately.  Both your student and you will gain feedback on whether he is struggling with the overarching ideas or with specific skills.  Over time, this feedback will contribute to a better understanding of a student’s academic strengths and weaknesses. It can be used to reshape his learning strategies for concepts or skills.  If, for instance, his concepts test scores are lower than those from his skills tests, it may mean that he isn’t reading well or is skimming over new vocabulary without really understanding it.  Similarly, low skills tests scores can lead to isolating the difficulty he is having with a specific subskill, like reading a story problem carefully or creating good research notes. Having one assessment for both concepts and skills can make discerning the nature of such problems more difficult.