ABSTRACT
There is a national commitment to advance educational equity, and socioculturally responsive assessments can play a critical role in fostering equity and inclusion. This chapter presents an approach to the design and development of born socioculturally responsive assessment, which refers to assessment that provides students opportunities to leverage their cultural assets and draw on their social contexts and frames of reference when demonstrating learning. A sociocultural dimensions matrix is offered as a tool intended to extend current practice beyond addressing surface layers of culture to considering deeper levels of culture that shape how students perceive, process, and represent information. By explicating the cultural factors (e.g., values, norms, beliefs) and social factors (e.g., language, social structure/dynamics, milieu) that affect students’ meaning making and their representations of knowledge, the matrix aims to enrich our understanding of our students and move beyond “impoverished models of cognition” that limit our observations and interpretations of what students know and can do. The matrix presents an opportunity to refine or redefine how we perceive and measure learning so that we (a) provide students optimal conditions for leveraging their cultural assets and drawing on their social contexts and frames of reference and (b) foster more inclusive, equitable, and valid measures of what our diverse learners know and can do.
