Culturally relevant assessments (CRA) account for multiple socio-cultural identities, experiences, and values that mediate how students know, think, and respond to test items. Given the diversity of modern classrooms, it is critical that education researchers and practitioners understand and strive to implement CRA practices. This systematic…

Enacting equitable teaching practices and sustaining those practices continue to be challenges in most high schools (National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, 2018), particularly in an era of high-stakes testing. Just one year after Boaler and Staples (2008) reported on the successes of "Railside High," where equitable teaching…

This study is part of a larger effort to investigate linguistic features of assessment items that might explain differential performance of English learners on science assessments. An analysis of a large set of multiple-choice items suggested two features that held promise in reducing the performance gap: the presence of contrast words and the…

We report on the use of bilingual constructed response science assessments in the context of a research and development partnership with secondary school science teachers. Our project provided a series of workshops for teachers where they explored students' emergent reform-oriented science meaning-making in our project-designed assessments. We…

The psychometric considerations and challenges associated with including constructed response items on tests are discussed along with how these issues affect the form assembly specifications for mixed-format exams. Reliability and validity, security and fairness, pretesting, content and skills coverage, test length and timing, weights, statistical…

Investigated whether group differences between immigrants and majority group members are best described as Jensen effects or as cultural effects and studied the bias of culture-reduced tests and culture-loaded tests. Findings from 2 studies involving 786 and 267 immigrants and comparable control groups demonstrate the presence of Jensen effects…

The paper discusses a new battery of tests, the Assessment of Basic Competencies, designed for fair assessment of the latent abilities of minority group children. It is explained that the tests provide diagnostic assessment in several domains of competence that are considered important for school learning. The three domains, information…

Determining the cross-cultural equivalence of multilingual tests is a challenge that is more complex than simple horizontal equating of test forms. This study examines the functioning of a trilingual test of preschool readiness to determine the equivalence. Different forms of the test have previously been examined using classical statistical…

A major criticism of standardized intelligence tests is their improper use in measuring the intellectual competence of culturally diverse children. Factors which complicate the issue are the definition of intelligence, content bias in intelligence tests, and the interpretation of test scores between white middle class children and children of…

In the United States, IQ tests are developed by and for whites. IQ tests and their derivates have been used on minorities not so much for prescriptive intervention purposes as for confirmation of suspiciously different behavior and for placement into special education and out of programs for the gifted, higher education, and advanced occupational…

In the past there were no substantial challenges to the idea that standardized, mass produced assessment would be universally beneficial. Culture was ignored or minimized as a factor in creating testing routines or in interpreting testing and assessment data. In recent years, challenges to this idea have arisen, but the primary pressure for the…

Finding innovative and effective methods to infer the ability of culturally diverse students continues to present a problem for educators. This paper proposes the House-Tree-Person (HTP) projective technique as a way for school educators to gather important data about student functioning without the use of culturally biased instruments. This…

A total of 102 Spanish-speaking and 104 English-speaking preschool 4-year-old pupils were individually administered the Spanish and English versions of the Cooperative Preschool Inventory (CPI) to examine item responses for possible bias. Miminum logit chi-square regression was applied to each of the 30 items of the CPI verbal scale. Each of the…

The premise that there are no valid and reliable psychological tests for use with Indochinese refugees is discussed. The history of the use of tests in the United States has been promulgated as being beneficial to the minority group members exposed to them without revealing their underlying discriminatory uses. Only the System of Multicultural…

The Montgomery County Maryland, public school system utilizes a bilingual assessment team as a means toward achieving nonbiased, cross cultural assessment to identify handicaps in limited English proficient students. Special education placement begins with referral from a teacher, parent, counselor, or the student himself; moves to consultation…