Adjudicating “Innovation”: The Role of Resistance in the Construction of New Formative Assessment Tools for Black Children

• In Event: Dismantling Conclusive Blackness: Countering the Deterministic Role That Assessment Plays in K–12 Education

Abstract

Education researchers, through explicit or implicit means, are “breathing race into the machine” in the ways in which they construct new assessment tools (Braun, 2014). While many critical scholars have correctly identified the status-reinforcing role that diagnostic, standardized testing, or other norm-referenced tests have played in the lives of Black children (Calarco, 2022; Ladson-Billings, 2006), there is remains a cautionary tale associated with the role that scales, surveys, and other formative assessment tools play in maintaining deficit frames for Black learners who sit at the intersection of race, ability, and gender (BLIND, 2020). This paper will share how we have unknowingly created many explanatory fictions when it comes to Black learners and their social and emotional development; and how without careful thought, what we hold as theoretically grounded critical inquiry in measurement is still eugenics shrouded in sheep’s clothing. Over the last year, a collective of scholars, educators, policy experts, learners, caregivers, and product developers have been exploring how new measurement tools and products must be a notable part of the resistance work that is needed for systemic change. Using construct development as the frame, lessons for improved methodology related to the creation of not only psychometrically sound, but asset-generative tools that contribute to new narratives of wellness and freedom for whole Black child development will be shared. Using examples that reframed the role that classical test theory and item response theory played in demonstrating construct validity will be offered as evidence that new tactical changes are needed in how we fit our Black children to measurement models, even when critical theories are seemingly used. Given the proximity of formative assessment to the daily decisions that educators and education researchers make about Black learning, adherence to a liberatory frame for innovation is key to the construction of new teaching and learning tools.

Author

• Temple Sharese Lovelace, Assessment for Good, AERDF