Chapter 3: Making Assessment Authentic For Multicultural Learners With Special Needs

America’s classrooms are becoming increasingly diverse. We are becoming the most ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse society that has ever existed. Consider the following statistics:

The appropriate assessment of all students has been a longstanding concern among special educators for more than three decades. Appropriate assessment is an especially critical issue for children from minority populations. According to Gargiulo (2009), assessment is the “primary vehicle through which access to services is determined and progress is evaluated, using a variety of formal and informal means. Assessment should be a dynamic, multifaceted, multipurpose decision-making process whose primary goal is to evaluate the academic and behavioral progress of a student” (p. 101). The growing number of culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) students in the nation’s classrooms and the tightening of school, district, and state accountability expectations are resulting in a reexamination of the assessment measures we use to refer, diagnose the need for special education services, and document student progress in learning goals. Assessment and instructional practices in American schools were neither created nor designed to be responsive to the range of diversity represented in today’s school population. There are several roadblocks to the goal of achieving meaningful and valid assessments of students who are culturally and linguistically diverse. Standardized testing has frequently been criticized for its failure to consider the cultural and experiential background of culturally and linguistically diverse students. Most standardized academic achievement tests require students to have specific culturally-based information in order to perform well on the test (Grassi & Barker, 2010). Many tests are culturally biased toward the mainstream—White, English only, middle to upper class students (Baca et al., 2004).