Promising practices for culturally relevant assessment: A systematic review

Abstract

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.