ABSTRACT
This chapter provides examples of a way to think about language and literacy assessment practices in an epistemically responsible fashion. A short chronology of assessment practices contextualizes the discussion. Following this is a discussion of how teachers can engage in defensible assessment practices through epistemically responsible assessment. Epistemically responsible assessment is premised on a set of ethical relations about knowledge and knowers that can be summarized in the phrase “know well and do well.” Three types of assessment practices are used to discuss how they can be considered in an epistemically responsible fashion. The examples are pedagogical documentation, oral reading and standardized testing. The scope, content, and structure and design of these practices are considered in terms of the offers these assessment practices make about student language and literacy skills and knowledge and the extent to which they enable us to know well and do well within assessment and as a consequence of it. The chapter concludes not only by noting the complexities that teachers face in thinking through the range of assessment practices that exist and then representing these to stakeholders, but also by observing that much of the assessment work of teaching occurs in the daily face-to-face teaching of effective classroom practice.
