Culturally Responsive Assessment: Provisional Principles

Abstract

Recent criticisms of large‐scale summative assessments have claimed that the assessments are biased against historically excluded groups because of the assessments' lack of cultural representation. Accompanying these criticisms is a call for more culturally responsive assessments—assessments that take into account the background characteristics of the students; their beliefs, values, and ethics; their lived experiences; and everything that affects how they learn and behave and communicate. In this paper, we present provisional principles, based on a review of research, that we deem necessary for fostering cultural responsiveness in assessment. We believe the application of these principles can address the criticisms of current assessments.

Computation and Accuracy Evaluation of Comparable Scores on Culturally Responsive Assessments

“…Several experts including Burns, Lundgren and Vecchie (2020), Hood (1998), Lee (1998), Montenegro and Jankowski (2017), O'Dwyer et al (2023), and Walker et al (2023 have described the idea, principles, and theory behind CRAs. However, to the best of our knowledge, there have been very few large-scale administrations of CRAs to examinees, which has contributed to an absence of statistical/psychometric models and methods for computing comparable scores from various versions of CRAs.…”

“…According to experts such as Hood (1998), Lee (1998), Montenegro and Jankowski (2017), and Walker et al. (2023), one approach to overcome the limitations of standardized assessments is to replace them by culturally responsive assessments (CRAs), which are assessments that evaluate students' knowledge, skills, and understanding in a way that takes into account their unique cultural identities (Landl, 2021). Because the idea behind CRAs is relatively new, it is unclear how one can analyze data originating from these assessments to make important conclusions.…”

Equity in Edtech by Design

“…Principle 5 encompasses everything from including the home and cultural assets of learners to re-designing the data visualisations and dashboards used to communicate about the learner. Ocumpaugh and colleagues (2023) stress that, for example, in designing dashboards, careful attention needs to be paid to how students are labelled as the evidence shows labelling (e.g., high performing) affects students' own self-conceptions and other people's expectations of their capabilities (see also, e.g., in O' Donnell & Sireci, 2022;Walker et al, 2023;and Bertrand & Marsh, 2021).…”