Developing Culturally Responsive Assessments of Teaching - Implications of Bob Mislevy

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Aditya

Bob Mislevy’s career shaped assessment as evidentiary reasoning under uncertainty, emphasizing that skills and understandings are socially situated and that assessment purpose must determine assessment use. This paper applies Mislevy’s core questions—what to assess, for what purpose, and how to build the assessment—to teaching, defining teaching as a complex adaptive system across classroom organization, social-emotional support, and instructional support and activation.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryResearch & Report

FormatPDF

Pages15

Reading Time38 min

AccessFree to download

Abstract

From evidentiary argument to evidence-centered design

Mislevy’s validity-argument implications for teaching

Teaching as a complex adaptive system

Domains of teaching to be assessed

Designing culturally responsive teaching assessments

Participatory, iterative, context-aligned processes

Validity arguments and interpretive inferences

Task design, scoring warrants, context, and alternatives

Conclusion

Developing Culturally Responsive Assessments of Teaching: Implications of Bob Mislevy WCER Working Paper No. 2026-2 August 2026 Courtney Bell and Drew Gitomer Wisconsin Center for Education Research University of Wisconsin–Madison [courtney.bell@wisc.edu](courtney.bell@wisc.edu) Keywords: culturally responsive assessment, teacher evaluation, evidence-centered design, validity, culturally responsive teaching, validity argument, teaching quality, educational equity Suggested citation: Bell, C. & Gitomer, D. (2026). Developing culturally responsive assessment of teaching: Implications of Bob Mislevy (WCER Working Paper No. 2026-2). University of Wisconsin–Madison, Wisconsin Center for Education Research. © 2026 by Courtney Bell and Drew Gitomer. All rights reserved. Any opinions, findings, or conclusions expressed in this paper are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Universities of Wisconsin, WCER, or cooperating institutions. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for noncommercial purposes by any means, provided that the above copyright notice appears on all copies. WCER working papers are available at [https://wcer.wisc.edu/publications/working-papers](https://wcer.wisc.edu/publications/working-papers) Developing Culturally Responsive Assessments of Teaching: Implications of Bob Mislevy Courtney Bell and Drew Gitomer 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, contextaligned 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. Developing Culturally Responsive Assessments of Teaching: Implications of Bob Mislevy Courtney Bell and Drew Gitomer Bob Mislevy spent the last several decades developing theory, methods, designs and tools to enrich the breadth and quality of assessment. He was not simply trying to re-engineer and improve traditional assessments, although he certainly did that. More critical was his theorizing about and designing of approaches to assessment that would be useful in highly complex, interactive, and adaptive domains. His work pressed the field to intentionally design assessments grounded in appropriate theories that could support learning within and from those assessments. In short, Bob’s approach suggested that assessments should acknowledge that skills and understandings are situated within social contexts that can vary across individuals and settings (Mislevy, 2018). He also emphasized that stakeholders could have different purposes for using an assessment, which affects what is learned from the assessment’s use (e.g., Mislevy, 20

FAQs

What is the central idea behind Bob Mislevy’s approach to assessment?

Assessment should be treated as evidentiary argument that supports inferences under uncertainty, with assessment purpose guiding how it is used. Mislevy also emphasizes that skills are socially situated across individuals and settings.

How does the paper define teaching for the purpose of assessment?

Teaching is defined as a situated complex adaptive system unfolding across three domains: classroom organization, social-emotional support, and instructional support and activation.

What makes an assessment “culturally responsive” in this framework?

Culturally responsive assessments must evaluate teaching rather than teachers, and they should be designed and validated through participatory, iterative, context-aligned processes that involve stakeholders throughout, not only during construct definition.

Oct 15, 2026

Uploaded by Aditya