**6. Conclusion**

Is the assessment for the student or the teacher? If you are not clear about why you are assessing (and what you are going to do with the data the assessment provides) you are wasting a lot of time, energy, and resources—your own and that of the students [14]. Always attention should be given to the broader meanings present in the data such that, if need be, student debriefing should be done to shed more light on the thinking behind their identified misconceptions. Therefore, I hold the view that teachers have to have a plan of what they are going to do with what they learn from the assessment (the data) before they give the assessment—ideally, before one even designs the assessment to begin with. An important implication of this view is that there is a need for teachers to understand the importance of prior knowledge to learning in order to facilitate learning. Students build on what they already know and have come to understand through formal and informal experiences. As such, students' knowledge structure (or connected understanding) should be reinforced in all learning incidents. Therefore, it is important to identify the processes and associated domain knowledge that students activate and bring to the solution context [16]. To continuously connect concepts in the learning of mathematics, teachers then need to incorporate concept mapping in the formative assessment process. The use of concept map helps students identify their concept knowledge gaps in a nonjudgmental setting and then develop practical means for attaining that knowledge [15]. Also the use of concept map helps students to improve their skills in negotiating meaning and challenging each other's explanations. On the other hand, concept map (as a formative assessment tool) provides teachers with a snapshot of students' concept knowledge gaps during the teaching and learning process. The spin-off from incorporating concept mapping in the formative assessment process is informative and reflective feedbacks tailored to students' personal abilities. This information helps teachers to plan instructional experiences aligned to students' traits.

Unless mathematics teachers provide a learning environment that promotes understanding through interaction, students might only commit unassimilated information to their short-term memory through rote learning, and no meaningful learning will occur. Therefore, the use of extensive formative assessment, vis-à-vis concept mapping, to drive instruction and implement a variety of strategies for the purpose of differentiating the instruction is of paramount importance.
