Greetings to you and welcome! We are about to take a very important journey together--a journey through the diverse and critically important world of educational assessment. As you will see, both student achievement and academic self-concept are determined, by and large, on the basis of students' perceptions of their own success in the classroom. Students rely almost completely on the day-to-day, week-to-week, and term-to-term classroom assessments of their achievement to judge their current success and their hope for success in the future.