8: Cultural and Language Awareness in Reading Assessment: Developing Valid and Reliable Tools That Can Be Adapted to Latin American Cultural and Linguistic Diversity

Reading comprehension is widely recognized as an important predictor of education success, economic growth, and well-being. Although there is generalized agreement about the importance of measuring reading comprehension, sensible educators around the globe raise concerns about the cultural adequacy of some measures used to assess students from different cultural backgrounds. At the same time, psychometrists warn against contextualizing measurement tools that may compromise validity. In addition, customizing versus being able to generalize results is a real trade-off between internal validity and external validity. Over-customizing tools may result in losing objectivity, as when using a different yardstick to measure different objects. Yet culturally deaf measures may fail at accounting for students’ real abilities, as cultural aspects obstruct the validity of the measurement.