Culturally Responsive Assessment: From Classrooms to Large-Scale Settings

Building on What We Know

Carla M. Evans, a senior associate at the Center, and Catherine Taylor, professor emeritus of assessment and measurement at the University of Washington’s College of Education, are the co-editors of a new book, Culturally Responsive Assessment in Classrooms and Large-Scale Contexts: Theory, Research, and Practice.

As part of the National Council on Measurement in Education’s (NCME) Applications of Educational Measurement and Assessment book series, the book is available at no cost for download, or a print version can be ordered from Routledge. Carla and Catherine recently discussed the book with the Center’s editorial director, Catherine Gewertz.

What led you two to edit this book?

Carla:

It started for me in 2020 when I was working with the Hawai‘i Department of Education to develop classroom performance assessments. I was aware of the impact of culture on assessment, but it became clear that I had a lot to learn.

After NCME put out a call for edited book proposals in 2022, which included culturally responsive assessment as part of a list of ideas, I wondered if I could continue to learn and contribute to knowledge building in our field by editing a volume. I had read Cathy’s book [Culturally and Socially Responsible Assessment], so I emailed her and asked if she’d consider having a conversation about co-editing a volume. And the rest is history, as they say!

Catherine:

I’d been working on a book about bias in testing. I’d written three chapters when George Floyd was killed [in 2020], and shortly thereafter, Breonna Taylor and Rayshard Brooks. I was shattered. I just stopped everything. I felt like I didn’t know enough to write anymore. I kept thinking it’s not enough to know that there’s a problem. We have to do something.

I eventually completed the book. But I knew that as a profession, we needed to focus on this. In my research, I found very little work that had been done around culturally responsive assessment. Lots about pedagogy, but very little on assessment, and most of it had been in the 1990s.

Carla:

I agree. Work in assessment, particularly the impact of human diversity, goes as far back as the 1940s. But the approach that a lot of folks used back then was, “We’ll just add 10 or 15 points to the scores of people who are minorities because we know the test is biased against them.” Not a very good approach.

Stafford Hood and others linked assessment with the culturally responsive educational movement—the work that Gloria Ladson-Billings had done in the early 1990s around pedagogy. It’s been decades of research and practical work, but we still haven’t made enough progress.

For example, I kept hearing people using the terms “culturally relevant,” “culturally sustaining,” and “culturally responsive” interchangeably. These terms were not very well defined in the pedagogy space. It’s hard to do practical applied work or research without agreement on the definition of these terms. I had a strong interest in understanding what they mean.

Why are these themes particularly timely or important right now?

Catherine:

We have to do something about the ways in which assessment blocks kids into a less-than position because they’re not part of the dominant white culture, and how that white culture influences education, classroom assessment and large-scale assessment.  Our current methods of assessment reinforce beliefs about students’ abilities and capacities.

The fact that NCME is doing this is a really important step, because NCME is the largest community of testing professionals. If anything is going to happen in large-scale testing, it will happen because NCME endorses it. We also need federal support. We need legislation that presses for culturally responsive assessment. As it’s done in the past, NCME can affect how people at the federal level think about assessment.

Carla:

And I also want to say that it’s important now because we’re in the midst of a culture war. No matter what political side people are on, they’re affirming in their unique ways that nothing is culturally neutral. Words matter, contexts matter, scenarios, stimuli, images on a test. They can all be controversial, because they’re perceived as not going far enough or going too far.

I hope the book will expand people’s ideas of what culture is. I think our authors do a really great job of bringing logic, reason and evidence to think about the ways tests are not culturally neutral by design, by validation, or by scoring. And they wrestle with the messiness of that.

What are a couple of things you most want people to take away from this book?

Catherine:

That there is a need for more research. We in the field of measurement and assessment haven’t done enough. That we need to know more and we need to do more; NCME members should know that people are trying to address these issues. People are really putting in the effort to figure out how to serve children with assessment.

Carla:

And I hope that people who read the book will get a sense of the complexity of the issues involved and maybe appreciate more the different approaches described in it. Our book is a sample of researchers, scholars and practitioners who are doing work in this area. They’re raising different questions and they’re proposing different kinds of solutions.

It’s not settled. It’s gray. And I hope readers say, “I’m going to lean into that uncertainty and continue to ask questions” rather than close the door.

In the book, you emphasize that it is about far more than students’ racial or ethnic diversity. What do you mean by that and why is it important?

Carla:

We tried to reimagine a future where [assessment reflects] all of the things that make us who we are. And that reimagined future is not just from an assessment perspective, but also from a curriculum and instruction perspective.

Students bring different backgrounds and assets into the classroom, and that’s much, much more than their race or ethnicity. They bring so much more richness. I want my own children to be able to bring into the classroom the fullness of who they are, their backgrounds, and let that shape what they learn, how they learn. Whether or not we are explicit about it, a lot of factors affect how and what students learn. We have to intentionally draw on that and connect to who our students are.

And that diversity is what we try to reimagine, how that is represented in assessment design, scoring, interpretation, validation, and use.

Catherine:

Kids are also creating cultures and adopting each other’s cultures. I firmly believe we cannot do anything in large-scale testing to deal with the complexity of culture. We can’t do that because of the demands of large-scale assessment. But we could if we changed our thinking about what its purpose is.

And if the purpose is for kids to learn—not to label kids, but to have them learn, and that the assessment supports that learning—if we think that’s what assessment is for, then we have to take into account the complexity of the students. That they are learning within a very complex context. They are bringing, as Carla said, their backgrounds with them, but they’re also creating. So it’s an interaction between the children and the world in which they live. If we narrow culture down to race, ethnicity, or even country of background, we’re still pigeon-holing kids into groups based on some demographic factor. The book offers a variety of perspectives to think about the intersections of identity students bring to school and shows how researchers and practitioners are working toward systems that honor that diversity.