Principles for Equitable Classroom Assessment

• In Event: Reconsidering Teacher Assessment Literacy: Evolving Trends and Practices in Education

Abstract

Issues of fairness in assessment are addressed in the Testing Standards, created jointly by the American Educational Research Association (AERA), the American Psychological Association (APA), and the National Council on Measurement in Education (NCME) (AERA, APA, & NCME 2014), which govern large-scale testing and in the Classroom Assessment Standards (Klinger et al., 2015) that articulate the knowledge and skills teachers need for classroom assessment. However, since the publication of both sets of standards, discussions about equitable and antiracist assessment have been gaining prominence with calls to move beyond traditional notions of fairness outlined in the standards (e.g., Randall et al., 2022). Assessment experts are beginning to examine the design, implementation and analysis of antiracist assessment (e.g., O’Dwyer et al., 2023; Hamdani, 2022; Randall et al., 2022). The purpose of this paper is to consider implications of equitable and antiracist assessment for classroom teachers’ assessment literacy knowledge and skills.

Figure 1 shows an assessment triangle (cf. National Research Council, 2001) that grounds our consideration, with the interaction at the vertices among learning goals that integrate cognitive, social/emotional and cultural dimensions of development (Goldman & Lee, in press), a means for eliciting high-quality evidence of those goals, and analysis of the collected evidence to develop an explanation or interpretation of the results.
Antiracist classroom assessment only can exist to the extent that teachers and other professionals are engaged first in antiracist teaching; second in antiracist assessment; and third in antiracist data interpretations and actions based on the assessment information. Therefore, each vertex of the assessment triangle should be viewed with an antiracist lens: what is to be assessed, how evidence of learning is collected and interpreted, and the implications for teacher learning. We propose that:
• Teachers examine their individual and systemic privileges, and develop a sociocultural consciousness, an affirming attitude towards students from culturally diverse backgrounds, and the commitment and skills to act as agents of change (Villegas & Lucas, 2002)
• Teachers have access to high-quality curriculum that integrates cognitive, social/emotional and cultural dimensions of learning. Teachers – or departmental groups of teachers – should not be creating these curricula on their own (Polikoff, 2021).
• Teachers understand how to identify, develop or modify assessments and assessment practices that access the breadth of the learning goals, including assessment of students’ funds of knowledge (Heritage et al., 2021) and that provide students with multiple ways to demonstrate what they know or can do.
• Teachers develop asset-based interpretations of what students are able to do in order to scaffold future learning on what they already know and develop a future-oriented mindset. An antiracist interpretation of data might also require consideration of other sources of data beyond the classroom assessment to support and inform asset-based interpretations (Safir & Dugan, 2021).

In the full paper we will develop these ideas further into a set of suggestions for what teachers need to know and be able to do, and ways in which they might develop the necessary knowledge and skills.

Authors

• Caroline Wylie, Center for Assessment

• Margaret Heritage, Heritage Consulting