Community colleges serve the noble mission of making higher education accessible to a broader spectrum of society than traditional 4-year institutions. A side effect of this broad access is a lower level of student preparedness for success in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) courses. This work describes our efforts to improve microscope skills among General Biology I lab students who often leave the course lacking acceptable levels of microscope skills proficiency, which may set them up for failure in higher level courses. We sought to improve student microscope skills by implementing formative assessment techniques in addition to summative assessment approaches. Our results suggest that the inclusion of formative assessment approaches can lead to improvements in student microscope proficiency by highlighting challenges or areas of student difficulty that summative assessment may only reveal after opportunities for further improvement have already passed. The instructor was also able to identify student challenges and modify his approach in a more effective manner than would have been possible using summative assessments alone.