ABSTRACT
Within educational measurement, socioculturally responsive assessment (SCRA) is an emerging concept synthesized from multiple literatures, including culturally relevant/responsive/sustaining pedagogy and funds of knowledge, culturally responsive assessment design and practices, universal design for learning, and the learning sciences. The basic premise is that students’ learning and performance is inextricably tied to the social, cultural, and linguistic contexts within which they live and develop knowledge; in other words, how students interact with content on an assessment and demonstrate their learning is dependent on how and where they developed their knowledge and skills. This development includes prior knowledge and experiences students have had inside and outside the classroom—for example, research on reading shows that for early readers, items grounded in a familiar setting or experience will be more readily accessible than items grounded in unfamiliar contexts, thereby supporting greater reading fluency and comprehension. To fairly surface evidence of what students know and can do, proponents would argue that assessments should be intentionally designed to be responsive to the social and cultural contexts within which examinees are living and learning.
