Community-Rooted Assessments and Measurements: Exploring the Relationships Between Community Knowledge, Intelligence, and Standardized Testing
Horton, Omaya
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2024-04
Abstract
Eugenicists’ ideology still impacts the way that we construct, validate, and disseminate educational assessments. As the U.S. education system continues to grow more ethnically and racially diverse, cultural relevance and ethical practices in the assessment space become increasingly more important. Scholars have highlighted the ways in which our students deserve more from assessments, bringing justice orientations, culturally relevant content matter, multimodal test formats, and pushing back on white universality. I offer community-rooted assessments and measurements (CRAM) as a practice that creates pathways to implementing this new wave of assessments. By considering research approaches and tools to engage community more effectively, CRAM considers the actions that should be taken to create a new just system. It incorporates three tenants; justice orientation, de-hierarchization, and localization and two pathways which I refer to as transformative reformation and systemic overhaul.