Key Terms & Definitions

Antiracist assessment

An antiracist framework for assessment must always critically question the structures and assumptions that make up the judgment of all assessment developers. It is explicit about its politics and its intent to reconstruct hierarchical racial power arrangements that have been historically (re)produced via assessments. With antiracist approaches to assessment, we acknowledge both the current and historical role of race and racism in our own assessment practices. Specifically, antiracist assessments:

• Explicitly disrupt conventional negative stereotypes, as they relate to any marginalized group
• Highlight oppressive sociopolitical inequities and injustices while empowering students to enact change
• Provide complete and accurate contemporary and historical perspectives that go beyond celebrating and/or protecting whiteness
• Allow for multiple ways of knowing/understanding and performing the content

Assessment justice

A justice-oriented approach to assessment design and development: (a) acknowledges the historical structures of oppression (such as racism, sexism, and colonialism) deeply embedded within our current assessment processes, (b) actively seeks to understand their ongoing consequences on marginalized populations; and (c) intentionally seeks to disrupt these negative processes and outcomes by centering the needs of these populations. Justice-oriented approaches to assessment do not seek to serve the greater good of the many and powerful to the exclusion/erasure of the few and minoritized, but rather aggressively prioritize/center the most marginalized populations. A commitment to justice is not represented by a mere commitment to equity, as equity approaches to assessment seek merely to provide scaffolds that compensate for historical and contemporary barriers.

Justice approaches, on the other hand, actively seek to remove those barriers and also make amends for the barriers ever having existed.

Culturally responsive assessments

Culturally responsive assessments are a natural extension of Gay’s (2002) culturally responsive teaching which calls for “using the cultural  characteristics, experiences, and perspectives of ethnically diverse students as conduits for teaching them more effectively” (Gay, 2002, p. 106). Grounded in the cultural context, culturally responsive (CR) assessments have been described as assessments that draw on students’ culturally based funds of knowledge, address some community-based authentic need (Lee, 1998), account for the background characteristics, beliefs, and values of students (Hood, 1998), and reflect these experiences and values in authentic, positive ways (Faulkner-Bond, 2022). Walker et al. (2023) defined culturally responsive assessments as assessments that account for “the background characteristics of the students; (b) their beliefs, values, and ethics, (c) their lived experiences; and (d) everything that affects how they learn, behave and communicate (p.1).”

At CMJ, we draw on all of these conceptualizations of culturally responsive content and extend them to make explicit that, in this work, culturally responsive assessments must recognize the role of power, privilege, and oppression in educational spaces – especially and including educational assessments. Consequently, to disrupt the current racial power hierarchy and systems of oppression in which we all operate, culturally responsive assessments must work to actively (a) decenter whiteness and (b) center the lived experiences of students with marginalized identities.