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

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

An alliance of researchers, educators, policy experts, and caregivers convene an interactive symposium that re-ignites the call for classroom assessment that sustains, responds, and is relevant to the lived experiences of learners in schools. Using the pursuit of new measurement models of social, emotional, and academic development in young learners as the foundation, this session will feature four papers that explore transformative paradigms for assessment creation that disarm traditional methodologies associated with rating scales, rubrics, checklists, and construct development. This community will share how they intentionally foregrounded intersectional, asset-based perspectives aimed at capturing modern trajectories associated with Black girls’ math identity, the inclusivity of Black language and rhetoric, supportive climate conditions for Black learners, and positive Black whole child development.

Sub Unit

• SIG-Classroom Assessment

Chair

• Lauren Kendall Brooks, AERDF

Papers

• Adjudicating “Innovation”: The Role of Resistance in the Construction of New Formative Assessment Tools for Black Children - Temple Sharese Lovelace, Assessment for Good, AERDF

• The Development and Validation of an Asset-Based Measure That Conceptualizes Mathematics Identity Through Black Girlhood - Elizabeth Anderson, Embraced Wisdom Resource Group; Nicole M. Joseph, Vanderbilt University; Fradely Delacruz, Embraced Wisdom Resource Group

• “Trying to Make a Dollar Out of 15 Cents”: An Asset-Rooted Method for (Re)Envisioning and (Re)Constructing English Language Arts Curricula - Teaira C. McMurtry, University of Alabama - Birmingham

• “Under the Black Students’ Gaze”: Centering Youth Who are Racially Marginalized in Building an Assessment of Schools’ Instructional Climate - Amber Majors Ladipo, Village of Wisdom; Dawn X. Henderson, Village of Wisdom

Discussant

• YJ Kim, University of Adelaide