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Originally posted on January 31, 2019, on LindaSuskie.com Last year was not one of the best for higher ed assessment. A couple of very negat...

Culturally responsive assessment

 Originally posted on June 8, 2019, on LindaSuskie.com

I have the honor of serving as one of the faculty of this year's Mission Fulfillment Fellowship of the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities (NWCCU). One of the readings that’s resonated most with the Fellows is Equity and Assessment: Moving Towards Culturally Responsive Assessment by Erick Montenegro and Natasha Jankowski.

A number of the themes of this paper resonate with me. One is that I’ve always viewed assessment as simply a part of teaching, and the paper confirms that there’s a lot of overlap between culturally responsive pedagogy and culturally responsive assessment.

Second, a lot of culturally responsive assessment concepts are simply about being fair to all students. Fairness is a passion of mine and, in fact, the subject of the very first paper I wrote on assessment in higher education twenty years ago. Fairness includes:

  • Writing learning goals, rubrics, prompts (assignments), and feedback using simple, clear vocabulary that entry-level students can understand, including defining any terms that may be unfamiliar to some students.

  • Matching your assessments to what you teach and vice versa. Create rubrics, for example, that focus on the skills you have been helping students demonstrate, not the task you’re asking students to complete.

  • Helping students learn how to do the assessment task. Grade students on their writing skill only if you have been explicitly teaching them how to write in your discipline and giving them writing assignments and feedback.

  • Giving students a variety of ways to demonstrate their learning. Students might demonstrate information literacy skills, for example, through a deck of PowerPoint slides, poster, infographic, mini-class, graphic novel, portfolio, or capstone project, to name a few.

  • Engaging and encouraging your students, giving them a can-do attitude.

Third, a lot of culturally responsive pedagogy and assessment concepts flow from research over the last 25 years on how to help students learn and succeed, which I’ve summarized in List 26.1 in my book Assessing Student Learning: A Common Sense Guide. We know, for example, that some students learn better when:

  • They see clear relevance and value in their learning activities.

  • They understand course and program learning goals and the characteristics of excellent work, often through a rubric.

  • Learning activities and grades focus on important learning goals. Faculty organize curricula, teaching practices, and assessments to help students achieve important learning goals. Students spend their time and energy learning what they will be graded on.

  • New learning is related to their prior experiences and what they already know, through both concrete, relevant examples and challenges to their existing paradigms.

  • They learn by doing, through hands-on practice engaging in multidimensional real world tasks, rather than by listening to lectures.

  • They interact meaningfully with faculty—face-to-face and/or online.

  • They collaborate with other students—face-to-face and/or online—including those unlike themselves.

  • Their college and its faculty and staff truly focus on helping students learn and succeed and on improving student learning and success.

These are all culturally responsive pedagogies.

So, in my opinion, the concept of culturally responsive assessment doesn’t break new ground as much as it reinforces the importance of applying what we already know: ensuring that our assessments are fair to all students, using research-informed strategies to help students learn and succeed, and viewing assessment as part of teaching rather than as a separate add-on activity.

How do we apply what we know to students whose cultural backgrounds and experiences are different from our own? In addition to the ideas I’ve already listed, here are some practical suggestions for culturally responsive assessment, gleaned from Montenegro and Jankowski’s paper and my own experiences working with people from a variety of cultures and backgrounds:

  • Recognize that, like any human being, you’re not impartial. Grammatical errors littering a paper may make it hard, for example, for you to see the good ideas in it.
  • Rather than looking on culturally responsive assessment as a challenge, look on it as a learning experience: a way to model the common institutional learning outcome of understanding and respecting perspectives of people different from yourself.
  • Learn about your students’ cultures. Ask your institution to develop a library of short, practical resources on the cultures of its students. For cultures originating in countries outside the United States, I do an online search for business etiquette in that country or region. It’s a great way to quickly learn about a country’s culture and how to interact with people there sensitively and effectively. Just keep in mind that readings won’t address every situation you’ll encounter.
  • Ask your students for help in understanding their cultural background.
  • Involve students and colleagues from a variety of backgrounds in articulating learning goals, designing rubrics, and developing prompts (assignments).
  • Recognize that students for whom English is a second language find it particularly hard to demonstrate their learning through written assignments and oral presentations. They may demonstrate their learning more effectively through non-verbal means such as a chart or infographic.
  • Commit to using the results of your assessments to improve learning for all students, not just the majority or plurality.