Assessments and Culturally Responsive Practices

Synthesis

Afflerbach:

One perspective on culturally responsive practices is that teachers should use them to bridge the gap between students’ experiences/context and the content that they are learning. To do so, teachers must find a way to discover their students’ “funds of knowledge and cultural practices” and use that knowledge to bridge the gap (323). Another perspective is that teachers should use this knowledge to help students navigate various discourses, such as the conventions for communicating with teachers in a particular school or the types of discussion inherent to a particular discipline. A third perspective argues that the other two are not sufficient. Instead, cultures and perspectives that are not mainstream should be incorporated into the classroom not only as a tool for students, but as a regular part of the curriculum. A few principles for culturally responsive practices with adolescents include: building relationships between teachers and students, respecting the multitude of cultural experiences that each person has, working with students to foster relevance, maintaining thorough knowledge of disciplinary knowledge (for the teacher), engaging students in several varied and authentic tasks within the discipline, and encouraging students to develop new understandings of content based on their own experiences.

Moje & Hinchman:

One issue that must be addressed before assessing adolescents’ reading is to define what adolescent reading is. Many people  presume that adolescents construct meaning from texts satisfactorily, so often assessments focus on using and reflecting on texts. However, some argue that it is important to measure basic comprehension because many adolescents struggle in the area of understanding. Within this balance, there are a variety of skills that adolescent readers can (and often do) use while reading, which helps create a definition of adolescent reading. Another issue is to determine whether assessment is successful, which can be addressed using three components. Assessments can measure cognitive aspects of reading, or what students do while they are reading and what meaning they construct from texts. Educators should also take into account how best to observe students’ reading, which helps determine what type of assessment is most suitable for a particular discipline or situation. Additionally, assessments should be constructed in such a way that interpretations of the data gained through them can be considered reliable inferences. Taking into account these issues, teachers can use the CURRV framework to determine the suitability of reading assessments. For adolescent reading, the following types of assessments are relevant: performance assessments (domain-specific, authentic tasks), teacher observation/questioning (framed to provoke the best insight), portfolio assessments (which can be in various forms), and high stakes tests (not usually very useful, but still very relevant to adolescent education).

Hinchman & Sheridan-Thomas:

It is important to remember that adolescent readers are still learning, both in the area of literacy and in the disciplines. Factoring this in, educators can use a content-area reading inventory (CARI) to assess how well students read content area texts. A CARI usually involves three steps: identifying necessary skills for a particular type of text, selecting valuable excerpts, and creating questions/prompts that provide valuable insights. Educators can evaluate students’ ability to use book parts, such as the table of contents and headings. Another area of content-area evaluation is interpretation of visual information, such as graphs and charts. Assessments can also focus on students’ understanding of the content vocabulary in a text. Additionally, students can be assessed on their ability to summarize key ideas and record their own understanding for further study. CARI assessments can help teachers understand whole classes, small groups, and individual students and use that data to inform their instruction. After administering a CARI, teachers can also help students use vocabulary self-awareness activities to help them monitor their prior knowledge and comprehension. To address some of the struggles that teachers may  discover, educators can use students’ strengths with out-of-school texts and media to foster background knowledge, relevance, and engagement.

Responses

The Afflerbach article mentioned that some educators “seek to make evident the power hierarchies inherent in school learning” that can make certain disciplines “accessible only to some students” (325). I’m very interested in this perspective. I absolutely think there can be complex relationships among obstacles in different fields, such as language, culture, or disability, that hinder some people’s and group’s tendency to succeed in that field. I would love to see more research and theory about how to help change these power hierarchies, or at least help our students have more access to all disciplines. Culturally responsive pedagogy is likely a good first step.

I’m really glad that I took the assessments course toward the beginning of graduate school. If I hadn’t, I think the Moje & Hinchman chapter and the Hinchman & Sheridan-Thomas chapter would have been a little overwhelming. I have learned firsthand that not all assessments are useful or suitable in all situations or with all students. I have also learned that various types of assessments are valuable in their own way, and it definitely takes both knowledge and practice on the educator’s part to be able to determine when and if to use each kind. And I have learned that good teaching is nearly impossible without some form of initial and formative assessment.

Questions

I feel like a lot of teachers probably aren’t often thinking about power hierarchies and marginalization of various cultures and perspectives in the classroom. How do you think we can help our fellow teachers understand and think about these issues more thoroughly?

What is a challenge that you face or think you will face with assessing students’ reading?

What is a type of reading assessment that you think would be particularly pertinent for assessing adolescent reading? Why?

To conclude the semester with my literacy for life class, I want to give them some strategies that they can use with the texts they read in content area classes like history, science, etc. What do you think would be a valuable assessment for me to use before doing so?