What is Equity in Assessments?
An assessment is a tool or process to evaluate and document a student’s academic readiness, knowledge, skills, and learning progress. Equity in assessments refers to fair and impartial opportunities for students to learn, be evaluated, coached, graded, advanced and graduate. This approach recognizes that not all students have the same starting point or access to resources to succeed in traditional assessment systems. It emphasizes the need to identify and address systemic gaps in students’ educational outcomes and respond to the needs of historically marginalized or disadvantaged students in education systems. Students can be disadvantaged due to their socioeconomic background, experiences of trauma, language barriers, racism, ableism, and other forms of oppression. An equitable approach requires instructors to reflect on our biases and how we understand our students. We may give students the same content and opportunity to be assessed; however, we cannot assume they will all be at the same level or approach an assessment the same way. Rather equitable assessments enable both majority and minority learners to learn more and learn better.
Reframing assessments through an equity lens means that every student has multiple and varied opportunities to show what they know, what they understand, what they can do, and where they need support. This requires instructors to provide clear learning expectations to ensure all students know what to do to succeed in a course. Equity in assessments also requires students’ results to be evaluated in ways that do not discriminate against or disadvantage students but instead inform instruction and support their learning and growth. When designed equitably, assessments can help reduce achievement gaps between different and increasingly diverse student populations.
Why Do We Need Equitable Assessments?
Assessments are essential to the educational process because they help identify student progress, strengths and improvement areas and enable instructors to provide targeted feedback and support. However, assessment practices like grading have historically disadvantaged students and do not accurately reflect their understanding of the material or ability to apply it in real-world situations. Grading in education is rooted in colonial and eugenic practices used to deem which students were “worthy” of advancing to higher levels of education or obtaining jobs (Beeghley & Butler, 1974; Houts 1976; Milsom, 2021). This practice has had significant social and racial implications for marginalized groups (Hounsell, 2007; Kellaghan & Greaney, 2019) who were often excluded or relegated to lower-level tracks based on assumptions about their abilities and potential. Today, the implications of grading persist and can reinforce existing social and economic hierarchies but also perpetuate negative stereotypes and biases about certain groups of students. For example, Black, Indigenous, and students of colour (BIPOC) are disproportionately affected by grading practices.
In addition, grading can cause undue stress and pressure on students, leading to a focus on performance rather than learning. This can limit opportunities for students to engage in self-directed and creative forms of learning. Moreover, the types of assessments used to grade students play a significant role in their learning experiences. For example, traditional and high-stakes assessments such as essays and exams create stress and inequity among student groups. When students feel stressed or anxious, their ability to perform well on assessments can be negatively impacted, resulting in unfair evaluations.
To address these issues, instructors should consider multiple approaches to grading and assessments. A stress-to-success approach emphasizes reducing students’ stress levels, promoting a positive learning environment by adapting or using alternative assessments, and evaluating a student’s progress and learning. For example, self-assessments, un-grading, feedback, peer feedback, and specification grading are alternative evaluation methods (Khon, 2011; Stommel, 2018; Stančić, 2021; Taylor, 2022). These methods move away from emphasizing grades for multiple tasks to focusing on feedback, giving multiple opportunities for submission, and involving students in the process to determine their grades. Strategies for feedback and alternative assessments are discussed below.
