Promising practices for culturally relevant assessment: A systematic review

ABSTRACT

Culturally relevant assessment (CRA) accounts for socio-cultural identities, experiences, and values that mediate the ways students know, think, and respond to test items. As CRA is unignorable for increasingly culturally diverse classrooms, this study investigates common practices and the impact of CRA on culturally diverse learners’ assessment outcomes. Based on a synthesis of 20 empirical studies, findings show positive evidence of CRA on diverse learners’ performance on test items and seven promising practices that can inform assessment development processes and content. These seven practices were classified along two categorical features of CRA including transparency of the assessment design process and cultural validity of the assessment. This article offers an in-depth description of the twelve practices with examples from the studies. Although studies that implement CRA in small-scale assessments were predominant, findings are discussed in view of their relationships with and significance for assessment across levels and areas of need for future studies.

Acknowledgments

We deeply appreciate New Meridian Corporation – Austin, Texas for providing the resources for this project during a summer internship.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Chioma C. Ezeh

Chioma Ezeh is an Assistant Professor of Education in the Department of Education at Elizabeth City State University. She earned her Ph.D. in Language, Literacy, and Technology and her Master’s in English Language Learners’ Education from Washington State University. Her research interests include multilingual literacy practices in linguistically and culturally diverse schools and sociocultural contexts of literacy education. She is currently researching literacy teachers’ sociocultural knowledge in their contexts of practice to understand their professional development needs, growth, and success in schools. Her work has been disseminated through over 20 international and national conference presentations, six peer-reviewed journal articles, and two book chapters.

O. J. Kehinde

Olasunkanmi Kehinde is a Ph.D. candidate in Educational Psychology at Washington State University, with a background in applied mathematics and statistics. His research interests include assessment and measurement, psychometrics, large-scale assessment, cognitive diagnostic models (CDMs), multilevel modeling, systematic reviews/meta-analyses, and structural equation modeling in social, medical, and educational contexts. Currently, he is investigating the performance of the longitudinal diagnostic classification model on growth and classification within the learning progression framework and exploring the role of progressivism in shaping curriculum, assessment, and instruction. His contributions have been disseminated at 14 conferences and published in five journals, underscoring his commitment to advancing the field. Notably, Kehinde’s scholarly achievements have been recognized through 12 scholarship and fellowship awards for his research endeavors.