Assessing Every Child: Using Purposeful Language Arts Assessments in Diverse Classrooms

Hilliard’s words remind us that the way we think about language arts assessment must be restructured to fi t the changing literacy demands of current classrooms (Edwards, Turner, & Mokhtari, 2008; Johnston, 2005). Language arts teachers are working with more students of diverse ethnic, racial, and linguistic backgrounds, (e.g., African American, Latino/a, Asian, and Native American) in their classrooms, and the diversity in our K-12 schools is expected to grow exponentially over the next few decades (Au, 2006). In addition to changing student demographics, language arts assessment must now address complex issues like socioemotional and relational aspects of literacy development because we recognize that literacy is more than a child’s score on a test.