Abstract
Educators and psychologists working in the schools continually struggle with the issue of how culture should be taken into account in the psychoeducational assessment of children and youth. When psychoeducational assessments are culturally informed, children are more likely to receive needed services and well-timed, effective educational interventions. When they are not, these assessments may fail to identify the problem correctly and lead to inappropriate interventions, resulting in children not being educated to their full potential. To maximize our ability to conduct culturally informed assessment, it is appropriate to return to and examine our basic assumptions. In this chapter I will focus on two fundamental questions: 1) why do we use tests in the first place? and 2) how can we accomplish the purposes of assessment and still be responsive to the cultural background of the test-taker?
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
American Educational Research Association, American Psychological Association, & National Council on Measurement in Education. (1999). Standards for educational and psychological testing. Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association.
Bartlett, F. C. (1932). Remembering. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Chapman, L. J., & Chapman, J. P. (1967). Genesis of popular but erroneous psychodiagnostic observations. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 74, 271–280.
Comas-Diaz, L. & Grenier, J. R. (1998). Migration and acculturation. In J. Sandoval, C. L. Frisby, K. F. Geisinger, J. D. Scheueneman, and J. R. Grenier (Eds.), Test interpretation and diversity: Achieving equity in psychological assessment (pp. 213–240). Washington: APA.
Dawes, R. M., Faust, D., & Meehl, P. E. (1989). Clinical verses actuarial judgment. Science, 243, 1668–1674.
Faust, D. (1986). Research on human judgment and its application to clinical practice. Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, 17, 420–430.
French, J. L. & Hale, R. L. (1990). A history of the development of psychological and educational testing. In C. R. Reynolds and R. W. Kamphaus (Eds.), Handbook of psychological and educational assessment of children: Intelligence and achievement (pp. 3–28). New York: Guilford.
Friedlander, M. L., & Phillips, S. D. (1984). Preventing errors in clinical judgment. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 52, 366–371.
Gambrill, E. (1990). Critical thinking in clinical practice: Improving the accuracy of judgments and decisions about clients. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Gardner, J. W. (1961). Excellence. New York: Harper & Row
Geisinger, K. F. (1994). Cross-cultural normative assessment: Translation and adaptation issues influencing the normative interpretation of assessment instruments. Psychological Assessment, 6(4), 304–312.
Genesee, F., & Upshur, J. A. (1996). Classroom-based evaluation in second language education. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jitendra, A. K., & Rohena-Diaz, E. (1996). Language assessment of students who are linguistically diverse: Why a discrete approach is not the answer. School Psychology Review, 25(1), 40–56.
Kurtz, R. M., & Garfield, S. L. (1978). Illusory correlation: A further exploration of Chapman’s paradigm. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46, 1009–1015.
Meehl, P. E. (1954). Clinical versus statistical prediction; a theoretical analysis and a review of the evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Sandoval, J. (1993). The history of interventions in school psychology. Journal of School Psychology, 31, 195–217.
Sandoval, J. (1998). Critical thinking in test interpretation. In J. Sandoval, C. L. Frisby, K. F. Geisinger, J. D. Scheueneman, and J. R. Grenier, J. R. (Eds.), Test interpretation and diversity: Achieving equity in psychological assessment (pp. 31–49). Washington, DC: APA.
Sandoval, J., & Duran, R. P. (1998). Language. In J. Sandoval, C. L. Frisby, K. F. Geisinger, J. D. Scheueneman, and J. R. Grenier, J. R. (Eds.), Test interpretation and diversity: Achieving equity in psychological assessment (pp. 181–212). Washington, DC: APA.
Sattler, J. (1988). Assessment of children (3rd ed.). San Diego, CA: Author.
Scriven, M. (1976). Reasoning. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Sue, D. W., Carter, R.T., Casas, J. M., Fouad, N. A., Ivey, A. E., Jensen, M., LaFromboise, T., Manese, J. E., Ponterotto, J. G., & Vazquez-Nutall, E. (1998) Multicultural counseling competencies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185, 1124–1131.
U.S. Bureau of the Census (1996). Warmer, older, more diverse: State-by-state population changes to 2025 (PPL-47). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Commerce.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media New York
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Sandoval, J. (2002). Examining the Role of Culture in Educational Assessment. In: Kurasaki, K.S., Okazaki, S., Sue, S. (eds) Asian American Mental Health. International and Cultural Psychology Series. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0735-2_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-0735-2_17
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-5216-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-4615-0735-2
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive