Culturally Responsive Pedagogy and Performance-Based Assessment

Abstract

A major challenge facing instruction and assessment is lack of evidence of their efficacy for students of color, excluding certain high-achieving Asian American groups, and poor students. This article considers authenticity of performance-based assessments (PBAs), exploring their relationship to pedagogical practices that address ethnic and linguistic diversity. It details author's efforts to transform English instruction and assessment in ways that draw upon cultural funds of knowledge that African American students bring from their home and community environments. Cognitive and cultural arguments for culturally responsive PBAs and research implications of their use are presented. THE DILEMMAS OF TESTING Arguments over limits of traditional multiple-choice standardized testing have been made for many years and have emanated from many corners of academia (Wolf, Bixby, Glenn, & Gardner, 1991). The movement toward performance-based assessment (PBA) has been manifested in more widespread appearance on market of portfolio and other PBA test packages linked to commercially prepared teaching materials such as textbooks and other curriculum support materials. Additionally, over last decade, a few key states (California, Kentucky, Maryland, and Vermont, among others) have begun to adopt formal performance-based assessment as part of their official statewide educational testing systems. The results of these state measures have been mixed and, in at least one state (California), rather disastrous. Nonetheless, performance-based assessments have been deemed in sense that they require students to tackle complex problems that have some real-world currency over an extended period of time. Such understanding performances (Perkins, 1992, p. 79) are often included as part of standards-based instruction, as in rigorous New Standards Project (NSP) (1997), which is beginning to be adopted by several states as an articulation of world-class standards in both curriculum and assessment.1 One of major challenges facing movement toward authentic instruction and assessment is lack of external validity that has been obtained as far as minority student populations and children of poor are concerned. Closer examination of this movement reveals that it is largely driven by White, university-based researchers, while its assumptions and products are largely tested on and geared toward White, middle-class students. Indeed, it is rare, if ever, that one sees included in examples of rigorous standards-based objectives, curricula, or assessments anything that smacks of ethnic or linguistic diversity. For example, none of samples of work provided in New Standards Project guide, especially those in its applied learning strand, address cultural diversity or needs or concerns of minority communities. As a case in point, language arts section of draft version of this guide presents an analytical essay considered to represent quality of student work in this area that assessment's developers would like to see. The essay offers a response to Winston Churchill's statement that American Civil War was the last romantic war and first horrendous modern war. However, inclusion of this essay, and elevated status attributed to it, strikes of insensitivity to African Americans, for whom Civil War, though undoubtedly horrible in its physical manifestation, represents far more than either a romantic or an horrendous notion. It is doubtful that test's authors would have considered placing an essay focusing on romanticism in German literature during period of Jewish Holocaust as an exemplar. Moreover, in both preliminary as well as current edition, NSP's exemplar of a potential reading list across genres includes only a paultry representation of works by African American, Hispanic American, Native American, or Asian American authors-let alone authors from Africa, China, or Central America. …

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