Consistent with its vision for an education system that supports all students on a path to progress, the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium is committed to exploring innovations that support improvements in teaching and learning. As with many aspects of education, the pandemic created an additional sense of urgency regarding the need for states to revisit systems of assessment to ensure that they meet the current needs of policymakers, district and school administrators, teachers, parents, and students. One path of innovation under consideration is a version of a "through-year" assessment that provides information about student learning during the academic year. Based on published papers and through discussions with the California State Board of Education (SBE) and the California Department of Education (CDE), Smarter Balanced began to explore how to make changes to the system that might mitigate some issues that have been identified, including end-of-year test length and the desire for information that can support student learning during the school year as well as teachers' learning and reflection about students' progress, thus supporting educators to accelerate student learning throughout the school year. To further add to the consortium's knowledge base on through-year assessment, Smarter Balanced collaborated with the CDE and the SBE to explore whether performance assessment tasks for the summative test can be administered during the school year in a way that informs both instruction and assessment. This brief summarizes the information gathered from the investigation. In addition, it describes planned future research to inform decisions regarding the implementation of performance tasks as part of a through-year approach to summative assessment.