Assessment and Culturally Responsive Practices

Synthesis

Moje and Hinchman
The authors of this chapter argue that all best practices are culturally responsive.  Responsive teaching is respectful of the individual as a person, as well as his or her learning needs.  It should be used as a tool for building bridges from one's Discourse to important learning concepts.  Often, Primary Discourses are misunderstood or ignored altogether.  All adolescents need multiple exposures to a variety of Discourses over time.  Cultural responsiveness should allow students to navigate across communities unlike their own.  But cultural responsiveness should not stop there.  The outcome of cultural responsiveness should be that there are changes in content knowledge and changes in classrooms that motivate and engage students.  Essentially, the world should be transformed through explicit discursive practices.  The end of the chapter gives some examples of teachers using culturally responsive pedagogy in their own classrooms.  Some of the best practices include explicit vocabulary instruction, real world simulations, scaffolding student efforts, and project-based units.  The teachers also do not assume that a person's heritage ensures a connection to their students' everyday experiences.  They work to build genuine interest and relationships with their students.  

Afflerbach
This chapter begins by asking three important assessment questions: "Why do we asses, what do we asses, and how do we assess".  To determine the answers to these questions, one must understand that reading is not just decoding words; it is comprehending.  Furthermore, adolescent reading is an ongoing process which requires the use of many skills and strategies to construct meaning.  Currently, a big problem with adolescent reading assessments is that they do not focus as much on the strategies used as on the content-area learning that has occurred.  Good reading assessments should have a cognition (what students do when they read), observation (assessing critical components of reading success), and interpretation (inferences we make from assessments) component.  The CURRV framework allows teachers to determine the appropriateness of a reading assessment.  Many state- or federally-mandated reading assessments are not appropriate or useful.  Several types of reading assessments for adolescents include performance assessments which typically involve a rubric; portfolio assessments, which can and should be adapted and actively used over time; teacher observation and questioning; and high stakes testing, which typically does not offer much help for teachers in the way of instruction.  The chapter closes by highlighting the need for professional development that places assessments in teachers' hands.

Hinchman and Sheridan-Thomas
Ideally, assessments will provide teachers with knowledge about how to modify their instruction so that students have the skills they need to become successful readers.  However, there are now so many caveats to assessing literacy in adolescents, such as the many text forms now available and the wide variety of students who need additional supports.  Also, many students who read well outside of school struggle with academic texts.  A content-area reading assessment (CARI) can assess a student's reading processes and direct instruction for large group, small group, or individuals.  Sections normally found in a CARI include using book parts, understanding visual information, understanding content vocabulary, determining and summarizing key ideas, and creating study reading aids.  By looking at the results from a CARI, teachers can determine patterns of errors and plan their lessons accordingly.  Word knowledge in adolescents must also be assessed.  To do this, teachers can provide a vocabulary self-awareness chart to which students can return and modify as they read.  Self-awareness charts help the teacher see which students need explicit vocabulary instruction before, during, and after reading.  Finally, since all types of media have become popular with today's students, they can be assessed using various forms of it.  One example in the chapter shows a teacher using a clip from Shrek 2 to ask questions and guide students through a blog response.

Responses

Text-to-Text
In our staff meetings, we have been discussing and reading about effective assessments because the school where I work typically has lower test scores due to the diverse population that we serve.  When we receive our test scores from the state each year, our school's effectiveness is determined by them, which I don't think is fair.  The Afflerbach reading really resonated with me because it, along with many of the other things that we have been reading in our meetings, pointed out that high-stakes tests are the least effective types of assessments.  With the Marzano framework, our school has chosen to focus a lot on teacher observation and questioning as a form of assessment.  This not only gives immediate, but fairly accurate results.

Text-to-Self
When I think about the types of assessments that I did when I was in school, I am encouraged by how many different types of assessments we now offer our students.  Computerized assessments were not even thought of for many years!  When I was in the gifted program in elementary school, we often had opportunities to be creative in the ways that we demonstrated our knowledge, but in the regular classroom, I remember a lot of multiple choice and essay tests.  I don't feel that these, or high-stakes testing, accurately measured my knowledge.  I always got test anxiety before them and didn't do as well as I knew I could.  I appreciated my gifted teacher for taking our diverse minds and backgrounds into account when she created assessments or allowed us to do inquiry-based learning.  The options available to students now are so much greater, if teachers indeed choose to use effective assessments.

Text-to-World
When I think about how the U.S. lags behind so many other countries in the realm of education, I wonder how much of this has to do with the assessments that are used.  Obviously, the United States is a productive country with intelligent citizens, but studies over and over have shown that our education is lacking.  It would be interesting to see how American students perform on the exact same test that is given to, say, Finnish students.  I would also be curious to know what kinds of assessments are given in the classroom in those other countries, such as whether they allow project-based learning or if they assess using media.

Questions

1.  What are your thoughts on high-stakes testing?  Do you think that schools should be "graded" based on their performance on these tests?

2.  Does your school or district provide much professional development about assessments?  The readings mentioned the need for this, but the actuality seems rare!