Here, it would be possible to establish a range of categories and subcategories relating to student socialization, academic performance, emotional development, improvement and a host of other crucial learning and developmental areas. The great value in the observational checklist is that it essentially creates a context in which all students are assessed according to the same standards of consideration. This improves the objective veracity of the yielded findings. Finally, portfolio logs will become possible over the course of a later school year, with the larger sample of completed work allowing for the observation of certain longterm patterns or periods of transition. By taking the time to assess the formulation of these patterns over the course of the school year, the teacher can begin to create a valuable data set through which to observe any number of importance...

This will have a strong bearing on the academic orientation which is available to students and can help to individualize and make personally or culturally sensitive the observational assessments to which students are treated.
The methodology of student assessment should be seen as a function of the nature of an assessment agenda. This is to indicate that while there is reasonable cause to argue that the planning of observation such as delineated here endorse a balance of both ethnographic assessment and those forms of assessment that tend to be more quantitative and comparative in nature. Observation can be a flexible and nuanced tool for student assessment provided that it is implemented according to a carefully sequenced and structured plan such as that highlighted above.