JEDI Compendium
Towards a Clearer Understanding of Student Disadvantage in Higher Education: Problematising Deficit Thinking
This article engages the uncritical use of the 'disadvantage' discourse and its effect on pedagogy. It explores challenges of coping with student diversity, with particular reference to the South African context. Students enter higher education institutions with a variety of educational backgrounds and preparation. The dominant thinking in higher education attempts to understand student difficulty by framing students and their families of origin as lacking the academic and cultural resources necessary to succeed. This constitutes a deficit thinking model: it focuses on inadequacies of students and aims to 'fix' this problem. In the process the impact of structural issues is minimized. Employing a deficit mindset perpetuates stereotypes, alienates students from higher education and disregards the role of higher education in perpetuating barriers to student success. To respond to diversity in the student body, we need thoughtfully to consider the readiness of higher education institutions to respond to students and cultivate the will to learn.
Connecting Assessment with Teaching through Faculty Capacity Building: An Example of an Oral Communication Assessment Project
Connecting assessment with teaching through faculty capacity building can be a design principle in any assessment project aimed at improving student learning. This design principle is supported by the evaluation capacity-building literature, backward design curriculum approach, research on learning, and inquiry-driven assessment-for-learning framework. This design principle guided the implementation of an institutional oral communication assessment project at a large public research-intensive university, from developing learning outcomes to using assessment results. Steered by five operating principles (be transparent, provide teaching support, foster shared understanding, form collaborations and value faculty expertise, and offer technical support), the center and campus groups carried out major strategies such as building a project website, providing pedagogy workshops for faculty, compiling teaching and assessment resources, organizing faculty study groups, and collaborating with stakeholders to use assessment results. Connecting assessment with teaching should be intentional in design and implementation to maximize the meaning and usefulness of assessment through capacity-building activities.
Enhancing Student Outcome Measures Through Culturally Relevant Assessment Practices
This paper is based upon a conference workshop session designed to a) demonstrate a pilot approach for enhancing assessment efficiency via use of a learning management system and b) to discuss a framework for shifting the culture of assessment away from compliance toward a culturally inclusive model. The theoretical foundations for culturally relevant assessment practice are presented along with institutional contextual factors. We posit that through the use of a Learning Management System, institutions are better able to conduct assessment that is culturally inclusive at the program level. Results from the pilot’s enhanced data analytics are shared. Three themes emerged from the workshop: defining and measuring culture, ethical stewardship of the management and use of student data, and obtaining institutional resource support. These three themes are discussed from perspectives offered in current literature. The paper offers terminology to shape institutional structures and capacity for culturally responsive assessment practice.
Increasing Equity in General Education Using Self Relevant Writing
Reports evidence that a self-relevant writing curriculum can support student wellness, engagement, and cultural inclusiveness. The authors revised a general education class (Child Development) to include culturally responsive assessments and instructional practices and created self-relevant writing assignments. In exit surveys, over 75% of students reported feeling that assignments enhanced learning, provided an accurate assessment of learning, encouraged reflection, and should be used in future classes. Responses to self-relevant writing assignments demonstrated awareness of the assignments’ personal relevance and were rich with references to students’ lived experiences. Authors found no evidence of equity gaps in self-relevant writing. Early retention data comparing participation in the course with participation in another large general education class revealed that participation may increase retention. Although preliminary, these findings may indicate that participation in a single deeply engaging class can have a broad impact on students’ experience. Self-relevant writing curriculum can be successfully adopted in both small and relatively large classes.
Daily OnlineTesting in Large Classes: Boosting College Performance While Reducing Achievement Gaps
An in-class computer-based system that included daily online testing was introduced to two large university classes. Examines subsequent improvements in academic performance and reductions in achievement gaps between lower- and upper-middle class students in academic performance. Students brought laptop computers to classes and took daily quizzes that provided immediate and personalized feedback. Student performance was compared with the same data for traditional classes taught previously by the same instructors. Exam performance was approximately half a letter grade above previous semesters, based on comparisons of identical questions asked in earlier years. Students in the experimental classes performed better in other classes, both in the semester they took the course and in subsequent semester classes. The new system resulted in a 50% reduction in the achievement gap as measured by grades among students of different social classes. These findings suggest that quizzing should be used routinely in large lecture courses to improve performance.
Culturally Responsive Teaching: Theory, Research, and Practice
The achievement of students of color continues to be disproportionately low at all levels of education. More than ever, Geneva Gay's foundational book on culturally responsive teaching is essential reading in addressing the needs of today's diverse student population. Combining insights from multicultural education theory and research with real-life classroom stories, Gay demonstrates that all students will perform better on multiple measures of achievement when teaching is filtered through their own cultural experiences. This bestselling text has been extensively revised to include: expanded coverage of student ethnic groups; a new section on standards and diversity; new examples of culturally diverse curriculum content; more examples of programs and techniques that exemplify culturally responsive teaching; an emphasis on positive, action-driven possibilities in student-teacher relationships; and new material on culturally diverse communication.
Assessing for Learning: Building a Sustainable Commitment Across the Institution
Argues that valid assessment of student achievement is based on assessing the work that students produce along and at the end of their educational journeys, and that assessment needs to be humanized, as opposed to standardized, to take into account the demographics of institutions. This expanded edition also focuses on ways to deepen program and institution-level assessment within the context of collective inquiry about student learning.
Numbers May Not Lie, But They Can Hide
Colleges and universities are required to produce a significant amount of quantitative data used to make critical decisions regarding accreditation, institutional quality, and effectiveness. These numbers form an institutional narrative that may mask other issues, overlook groups of students while privileging others, and ignore bias. Socially just assessment requires a critical examination of the processes we use to collect quantitative data and the interpretation of this data. This article offers examples of ways in which quantitative data may hide information and highlights critical questions to consider when collecting or interpreting data: “Who the numbers represent,” “Have we explored multiple identities of students?” and “How should we interpret benchmarks.” The goal is to enhance assessment work by adopting an equity-minded approach that challenges the misconception of numbers as “objective.” By asking critical questions about the numbers and the processes by which they are determined, we can develop equitable and socially just higher education institutions.
Toward a Theory of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy
In the midst of discussions about improving education, teacher education, equity, and diversity, little has been done to make pedagogy a central area of investigation. The article attempts to challenge notions about the intersection of culture and teaching that relies solely on microanalytic or macroanalytic perspectives. Attempts to build on the work done in both of these areas and proposes a culturally relevant theory of education. By raising questions about the location of the researcher in pedagogical research, explicates the theoretical framework of the author in the nexus of collaborative and reflexive research. The pedagogical practices of eight exemplary teachers of African-American students serve as the investigative "site." Their practices and reflections on those practices provide a way to define and recognize culturally relevant pedagogy.
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies: Teaching and Learning for Justice in a Changing World
Culturally Sustaining Pedagogies raises fundamental questions about the purpose of schooling in changing societies. Bringing together an intergenerational group of prominent educators and researchers, the volume engages and extends the concept of culturally sustaining pedagogy (CSP) -- teaching that perpetuates and fosters linguistic, literate, and cultural pluralism as part of schooling for positive school transformation. The authors propose that schooling should be a site for sustaining the cultural practices of communities of colour, rather than eradicating them. Chapters present theoretically grounded examples of how educators and scholars can support Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian/Pacific Islander, South African, and immigrant students as part of a collective movement towards educational justice in a changing world
Whistling Vivaldi: How Stereotypes Affect Us and What we Can Do
In Whistling Vivaldi, renowned social psychologist Claude M. Steele addresses one of the most perplexing social issues of our time: the trend of minority underperformance in higher education. With strong evidence showing that the problem involves more than weaker skills, Steele explores other explanations. Here he presents an insider's look at his research and details his groundbreaking findings on stereotypes and identity, findings that will deeply alter the way we think about ourselves, our abilities, and our relationships with each other." Through dramatic personal stories, Steele shares the researcher's experience of peering beneath the surface of our ordinary social lives to reveal what it's like to be stereotyped based on our gender, age, race, class, or any of the ways by which we culturally classify one another. What he discovers is that this experience of "stereotype threat" can profoundly affect our functioning: undermining our performance, causing emotional and physiological reactions, and affecting our career and relationship choices. But because these threats, though little recognized, are near-daily and life-shaping for all of us, the shared experience of them can help bring Americans closer together.
A New Decade for Assessment: Embedding Equity into Assessment Praxis
Entering into a new decade with an even more diversified college student population will not only require more assessment models involving students but also deeper professional development of institutional representatives key to student learning. Reflecting upon the conversations over the last three years around culturally responsive assessment and related equity and assessment discussions, this occasional paper highlights questions, insights, and future directions for the decade ahead by exploring what equitable assessment is and is not; the challenges and barriers to equitable assessment work; where the decade ahead may lead; and next steps in the conversation on equity and assessment.
Operationalizing Culturally Relevant Pedagogy: A Synthesis of Classroom-Based Research
Presents a synthesis of classroom-based research on the implementation of culturally relevant pedagogy. Examines 45 classroom-based research studies from 1995 to the present, highlighting culturally relevant pedagogy as enacted in classrooms. Addresses conundra and unanswered questions stemming from the research. By describing and synthesizing how others have operationalized culturally relevant pedagogy in the classroom, offers illustrative discussion points to assist preservice teachers, experienced teachers, and teacher educators in developing a more holistic understanding of what culturally relevant pedagogy "looks like" in classrooms.
Reframing Assessment to Center Equity: Theories, Models, and Practices
Makes the case for assessment of student learning as a vehicle for equity in higher education. Proceeds through a framework of "why, what, how, and now what."
Moving Towards Socially Just Assessment
Considers the multiple intersections of assessment, equity and inclusion, and social justice in the field of student affairs and unpacks the very process of assessment, recognizing how siloed the “assessment” and “diversity, equity and inclusion” conversations and practices tend to be in the field of student affairs and in practice on campus. Reflecting on elements of culture, assessment’s philosophical assumptions and methods, and the systems of power and oppression, views the various terminology and concepts in the field as existing on a continuum, characterized by increasing levels of individual action to address. Develops the idea of culturally-responsive assessment: a continuum for assessment with components that foster equity and inclusion.
A Critical Race Case Analysis of Black Undergraduate Student Success at an Urban University
Presented in this article is a case study of Black students’ enrollment, persistence, and graduation at Cityville University, an urban commuter institution. We combine quantitative data from the University’s Office of Institutional Research and the U.S. Department of Education with qualitative insights gathered in interviews with students, faculty, and administrators. We then use tenets, theses, and propositions from Critical Race Theory to analyze structural problems that undermine persistence and degree completion, sense of belonging, and academic achievement for Cityville’s Black undergraduates.
Equity Minded Syllabus Design Rubric
Hardaway, an Instructional Designer in the Fresno State Office of Ideas, developed this rubric to capture research-based good practices for incorporating JEDI into courses across the curriculum. These include practices related to engagement, pedagogy, and assessment. The rubric is being further developed as part of a research project and in discussion with the faculty learning community.
Balancing the Freedom to Teach with the Freedom to Learn: The Critical Role of Assessment Professionals in Ensuring Educational Equity.
Addresses the balance assessment professionals must strike in supporting academic freedom, shared governance practices, and learning improvement efforts within colleges and universities in the United States. Addresses how assessment professionals can encourage increased educational equity while supporting academic freedom. The authors offerperspectives as former faculty members, current assessment practitioners, and academic administrators working to ensure that institutions are using assessments of student learning to improve learning for all students. Provides insight into the ways in which assessment information shapes institutional efforts, balancing the rights of faculty to control the curriculum with the rights of historically underserved students (including students from underserved ethnic or racial groups, first generation college students, students from low-income households, and students with special needs or disabilities) to receive a quality education. One solution to this apparent conflict is to provide faculty with data that allow them to analyze the ways in which their assessment choices influence educational equity. Describes ways to reduce areas of conflict by creating a culture of inquiry that centers around consideration of data and opportunities to modify assessments to increase educational equity.
Yale Inclusive Classroom Climate
An inclusive classroom climate refers to an environment where all students feel supported intellectually and academically, and are extended a sense of belonging in the classroom regardless of identity, learning preferences, or education. Such environments are sustained when instructors and students work together for thoughtfulness, respect, and academic excellence, and are key to encouraging the academic success of all students. Research indicates that many students may be more likely to prosper academically in settings with more collaborative modes of learning that acknowledge students’ personal experiences. This site provides examples of pedagogy and assessment to promote inclusion.