Student achievement happens because you plan for it in your curriculum and instruction techniques. Here are some tips for increasing your students' abilities to perform well. Creating a wide variety of daily assignments, reports, projects, group assignments and homework helps you assess your students fairly and accurately. While quizzes and tests can be developed to assess student performance, so, too, can carefully constructed assignments. Before assigning homework or a project, examine your goals and objectives for students in your lesson and unit plans. Consider what skills students need to practice and what knowledge they need to learn in order to meet those objectives. Then create assignments that fulfill those student needs. An example: If you want your students to be able to identify and plot positive ordered pairs on a graph, then you need to provide them with instruction and lots of varied practice. You might also assign students to create their own problems or explain to another person outside of class how to plot pairs on graphs. Finally, you can include problems for students to solve on unit quizzes or tests. This is also a skill that is tested on the FCAT for Mathematics. You can also add assessments that can be adapted to your students' different learning styles by considering alternative assessments. These include open book and open note tests, take-home tests, journals, experiments, demonstrations, speeches, oral reports, computer presentations, and many others. As you continue in your profession, keep a journal and create a good filing system that helps you keep copies of your ideas and assignments that worked, as well as examples of assessments you have created.