Equity as an emerging issue in assessment policy and practice

The American educational system is in the process of exploring equity as an integral construct in assessment policies and practices.

This paper reviews the historical role of testing in reinforcing and extending social inequalities and the use of testing in a current assessment system which makes high stakes decisions about students, schools, and programs. It then reviews the efforts of educators who are presently developing new forms of assessment while striving to embed equity considerations in their design and implementation from the outset. This paper is an examination, then, of educators on a journey in search of equity in assessment policy and practice.

The paper argues that equity is emerging as an issue in the policies and practices surrounding assessment, and that such an emerging role has the as yet unproven potential to enhance equitable outcomes for students in the areas of quality of learning experience, rewards of educational endeavor, and opportunity to learn.

In a historical review, the paper demonstrates that ties between equity and assessment have not always been in evidence. The historical testing system in the United States was designed to be inequitable for political and societal reasons. The present system is shown to promote equity by holding it at arms length through culture-free, highly standardized objective assessments. The argument is made that it has actually harmed students by excluding them from high quality educational services.

Proposed systems of assessment based on performance assessment are reviewed and shown to hold promise for increased equity. Finally, in an exploratory study, data from surveys and focus groups of California teachers participating in performance assessment activities are used to illustrate the impact of the new assessments on teaching practice.

This study reviews a number of questions in describing the emerging role of equity in assessment policy and practice, set in a context of three outcomes associated with equity: (1) the quality of the learning experience as envisaged by mediated learning: (2) the rewards of educational endeavor as framed by the notion of problem posing education; and (3) expectations for learning as embedded in opportunity to learn.