This report focuses on results of a systematic study of instructional assessments of early literacy designed by teachers and other educators for use in K-3 classrooms. The report presents the methodology and coding scheme used for collecting classroom-based measures and evaluating their content. It provides data about how reading and writing skills are assessed by teachers and shows the relationship between the skills included on these assessments and the skills associated with national standards and benchmarks. It also characterizes the instructional assessments teachers use in their classrooms to evaluate their students' literacy performance in terms of categories of skills assessed, types of assessment models utilized, differences in student responses elicited by the assessments, forms of administration, types of mental processing required of students, and other parameters. The discussion concerns questions about the psychometric properties of these assessments, their relationship to national standards, and their place in the instructional process for classroom teachers. (Contains 127 references, and 19 tables and 5 figures of data. Appendixes contain a coding manual for informal literacy assessments; a summary of assessments (in tabular form); a table listing the number of specific skills or elements by assessment; a list of skills or elements included in the assessments; and a narrative description of two measures and the output of each assessment.) (Author/RS)