Assessment is, unfortunately, a touchy question. The National Council of Teachers of English abhors any content-based standards, and, as a result, any standards at all. State Boards of Education are just as bad. They produce almost impenetrable volumes of mush, but I have yet to see a state standards document that even requires students to be able to identify subjects and verbs in sentences written by their peers. The results of this are harmful, especially for public school teachers. They are expected to improve students' ability to read and write, but with no clearly identifiable standards for the students to meet, the students cannot be held responsible for learning anything.
     An objective of KISS is to suggest a set of standards for grammar, but for the present, those standards cannot be clearly identified with any specific grade level. If, for example, students begin KISS in second grade, by the end of fourth grade they could be expected to be able to identify the clause structure of sentences that included simple adverbial, adjectival, and noun clauses. But if students begin KISS in fourth grade, this would be an unreasonable expectation. As developed on this site, KISS does begin in second grade, and by the end of seventh, students could be expected to be able to explain how any word in any sentence chunks to a main-clause S/V/C pattern. The quizzes in this section are therefore set up for these objectives.
     Parents who are home-schooling really will not need these assessment quizzes. Working so closely with their children, they will know what their children do and do not understand. For classroom teachers, of course, the situation is very different. Assessment quizzes can be used at the beginning of the year to enable teachers to see what their new students, individually and as a group, do and do not know. At the end of the year, assessment quizzes could become part of official assessment. There are at least three different skills that should be assessed within the KISS framework.

1. Writing

     In a writing quiz, students are asked to write sentences that include specific types of constructions and to underline those constructions. In this type of quiz, point values depend on the number of constructions that students are expected to write. The following is a writing assessment quiz for KISS Level Three:
 

"Writing" quizzes are important for checking to see that students can recognize and consciously produce specific constructions, but they will not fully reveal the students' ability to untangle the complicated sentences that students will find in their reading--or themselves write. To check for this, KISS offers a specific format for "Analysis Quizzes."

2. Analysis Quizzes

     Like most of the KISS identification exercises, "Analysis" quizzes are based on a short text. The format, however, differs such that specific point values can be assigned to different parts of the text. The sentences in the text should be numbered, and the students should be given the text in a format (double-spaced) such that they can analyze the text (parentheses, etc.) as they normally would. In this format, the questions are divided into two sections.
     The directions for the first section are:

I. Indicate the S/V/C pattern(s) of the main clause(s) in each sentence and the words or constructions that fill the slots in those patterns.  (xx each)

II. Explain how each of the following words is related to its basic pattern. Once you name a word that you have already explained, you should stop. (x each)

3. Testing for Procedures and Definitions

      More than twenty years of teaching with the KISS Approach have convinced me that most students major problem is that they refuse to memorize the relatively few, but extremely important procedures and definitions. Students often complain, for example, that they cannot understand complements. But when I ask them to give me the sequence for distinguishing complements, they cannot do so. That procedure is relatively simple: If the complement describes the subject, it is a predicate adjective. If it equals the subject (and the verb in any way means "equals), the complement is a predicate noun. If the complement indicates to or for whom something is done, the complement is an indirect object. Any other complement has to be a direct object. 
     Similarly, students can rarely, if ever, untangle a multi-clause sentence without knowing that a clause is "a subject / (finite) verb / complement pattern and all the words that chunk to it." If our objective is to enable students to analyze sentences so that they can intelligently discuss them, then we need to reinforce the procedures and definitions that students need to know. Including them on assessment quizzes not only does that, in many cases it also clearly lets us know why and where students are having problems.

     It should be obvious, but I'll mention it anyway. The three things discussed above can be combined into one assessment quiz.