Since some students take longer to achieve curricular goals or have different instructional problems than other students, detailed information on what it is that specific students know and how they think can be particularly useful to teachers as they customize lessons. Assessment reform can also improve the quality of student learning by upgrading the complexity of tasks. While traditional assessments rely on multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank responses that favor lower levels of knowledge, performance assessments and projects provide students with tasks that examine higher levels of knowledge and are more similar to the types of tasks that students will encounter in the realworld (Shavelson, Baxter, & Pine, 1992).