ABSTRACT
Socioculturally Responsive Assessment begins with the recognition that a student’s understanding and interactions in an assessment situation are deeply situated. Student responses depend on personal histories of experience, encompassing social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds. Leveraging these understandings and interactions in assessment designs and processes holds promise for improving the quality of interpretations, uses, and consequences. To parse sociocultural aspects and relationships in educational assessments, we offer a sociocultural lens. The lens has two uses. As an anticipatory design framework in the tradition of evidence-centered design, the lens affords designers a high-level framework that connects an assessment argument to operational assessment details. As an interpretative framework, the lens offers users a ground-level viewpoint that identifies key aspects associated with a given assessment in relation to given sociocultural milieux. These aspects are central in assessment design and inferential properties. Taken together, aspect-indexed evidentiary arguments enable us to more fully understand the roles that sociocultural aspects play in a given assessment within the particular logical structure of assessment argumentation. To demonstrate the usefulness of the lens, we apply it to a range of case studies for single, then multiple, assessments. These case studies allow us to consider fundamental issues of validity and comparability with the emergence of assessments that advance sociocultural responsiveness.
