Developing Culturally Responsive Assessments of Teaching: Implications of Bob Mislevy
WCER Working Paper No. 2026-2
Courtney Bell and Drew Gitomer
August 2026, 13 pp.
ABSTRACT: Bob Mislevy spent decades developing theory, methods, and tools that positioned assessment as an instance of the more general problem of using evidentiary argument to make inferences in the presence of uncertainty. He argued that skills and understandings are situated within social contexts and therefore, the purpose of an assessment must guide any assessment use. This paper applies Mislevy's foundational questions—what are we assessing, for what purpose, and how should we build the assessment—to the domain of teaching. We define teaching as a situated complex adaptive system unfolding across three domains (classroom organization, social-emotional support, instructional support and activation) and argue that culturally responsive assessments must evaluate teaching, not teachers. We propose that such assessments should serve two purposes—supporting teacher learning and supporting teacher flourishing—and should be designed and validated through participatory, iterative, context-aligned processes that engage stakeholders throughout, not only during construct definition. Drawing on Kane’s validity-argument framework and Mislevy’s evidence-centered design, we specify how interpretive and validity arguments for teaching assessments must attend to task design, scoring warrants, contextual information about teachers, and alternative explanations. We conclude that culturally responsive assessment and Mislevy’s sociocognitive approach are mutually reinforcing resources for advancing more just assessments of teaching.
keywords: culturally responsive assessment, teacher evaluation, evidence-centered design, validity, culturally responsive teaching, validity argument, teaching quality, educational equity
