Join Karina Rodriguez (Highlander Institute), Lauren Kendall Brooks (AERDF), and Teaira McMurtry (University of Alabama at Birmingham) online for a virtual session as part of the 2023 NCME Annual Meeting.
Session Title: Beyond Basketball & Bodegas: Pursuing True Cultural Validity in Formative Assessment
Date & Time: Thursday, March 30, 2023 from 1:00PM – 2:30PM CT / 2:00PM – 3:30PM ET
Description: Tropes related to basketball, clothing, hair, and superfluous community contextual details permeate the narratives that constitute “multicultural” test items from teacher-derived formative assessment to large-scale assessment tools. As instrument developers pursue inclusion and representation through test content, they walk a fine line between being complicit in using racist, ableist, and gendered language and creating a test environment that honors the linguistic and cultural heritage of its intended users. Through the eyes of a community of developers brought together for a new inclusive, equity-informed R&D initiative, this session will feature lessons learned from the implementation of a culture-forward approach to validity for K-12 formative assessment. This panel will highlight how cultural validity must expand to include the positive experiences of multi-generational American students who sit at the intersections of oppressed identities, and why our evaluative processes that govern some of the most critical gateways within their educational experiences must change. Through a dialogic process with attendees, this session will feature how we can collectively tackle the better psycholinguistic approaches in technology-enhanced and technology free assessment prototypes and why community must be a partner in this process in order to expand a new approach to asset-based, culturally representative assessment content.
