ABSTRACT
The topic of psychological and educational assessment and cultural diversity has received a great deal of professional and public attention. Some well-known court cases in the 1970s and 1980s, most notably Larry P. v. Riles and Diana v. State Board of Education (both in California) and Guadalupe v. Tempe Elementary School District (Arizona), placed the issue of cultural validity of standardized assessment instruments in the forefront of professional practice. These cases resulted in calls for change (and, in some cases, legal mandates for change) in special education assessment practices with racial/ethnic minority youth. During the 1990s, a widespread flurry of professional and public attention accompanied Hernstein and Murray’s (1994) book The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life, which addressed the issue of racial/ethnic differences and possible bias on IQ and achievement tests. These few examples among many provide some evidence that the issue of cultural diversity in assessment is complex and has become a serious concern. This concern has stimulated the field to take action in research and practice, as evidenced by numerous books and chapters on the topic (e.g., Castillo, Quintana, & Zamarripa, 2000a, 2000b; Dana, 2000a, 2000b, 2005; Martines, 2008; Rhodes, Ochoa, & Ortiz, 2005; Suzuki, Ponterotto, & Meller, 2008). Professional, public, and legal attention on this topic has been focused almost exclusively within the domain of cognitive assessment, as is stated in Chapter 1. By comparison, far less attention has been paid to the issue of cultural diversity and behavioral, social, and emotional assessment, and most of this attention has been on assessment with adults rather than children. For whatever reason, the assessment establishment and the public have rather uncritically accepted much of the reasoning on behavioral, social, and emotional assessment across cultures. This statement should not be taken to imply that there are no critics of these practices. On the contrary, a handful of writers have decried the current state of affairs regarding assessment and cultural diversity, including the social-emotional domain. Dana (1996), a scholar in the area of multicultural applications of psychological assessment, stated:
With few exceptions the psychological tests used in the United States have been designed by Europeans or North Americans and embody a Eurocentric world view and derivative psychometric technology. Comparisons among ranked individuals or groups expose human differences within a format of psychological judgment using Anglo American normative standards. Standard tests of intelligence, personality, and psychopathology are often assumed to be genuine etics [italics added], or culture-general in application. In fact, most of these tests are culture-specific or
emic [italics added] measures designed for Anglo Americans, but have been construed as imposed etic measures, or pseudo etics, because the equivalence with different cultural groups has not been demonstrated.
