Chapter 6: Culture in Fair Assessment Practices

Given the diversity of our student population, and because test scores can limit students’ subsequent opportunities, consideration of the degree to which culture influences perceptions, logic, and reasoning, as well as student engagement with and response to information and experiences is critical. Such consideration of culture needs to extend beyond our current assessment practices and can affect how we define and measure certain constructs, and our understanding of student assessment performance. This chapter presents conceptual work that draws from a number of disciplines including, linguistics, intercultural communication, psychology, education, and measurement. It examines culture in fair assessment practices. More specifically, it describes cultural dimensions that affect our meaning-making, discusses cultural sensitivity, and considers implications of possible construct-relevant factors that are culture-based. General principles and a heuristic for culturally-sensitive assessment design and development are presented that extend our current treatment of culture in assessment, have potential to guide principled variation in task design, contextualization, and analysis, and can enhance our fair assessment practices.