The Department of Educational Psychology at the University of Kansas will host the 2023 Lichtenberg Lecture at 9:30 a.m. Friday, October 20 in Joseph R. Pearson Hall (JRP) room 150. The lecture will feature Jennifer Randall, Dunn Family Endowed Professor of Psychometrics and Test Development in the Marsal Family School of Education at the University of Michigan.

Randall is also the Dunn Family Chair of Psychometrics and Test Development and the founding President of the Center for Measurement Justice. Her work seeks to disrupt white supremacist, racist logics in assessment through justice-oriented, antiracist practices.

Randall’s presentation, “Validity in Pursuit of Justice,” will focus on the theme of validation. “I contend that the validation process, arguably the most important process in educational measurement, has served as one measurement’s primary weapons of racist oppression and marginalization,” said Randall. “I argue for a justice-oriented, antiracist approach– rooted in critical theory – that seeks to actively disrupt our current practices rooted in the white supremacist hegemony.”

Participation in the lecture is free and open to the public, though an online RSVP is required. Learn more and RSVP.

Abstract

I contend that the validation process, arguably the most important process in educational measurement, has served as one measurement’s primary weapons of racist oppression and marginalization. Cushman (2016) writes that “validity as a tenet is used to claim, gather, and justify results with so many performance and survey tools, it has now more than ever been used to routinize inequities as naturalized parts of systems of educational access…“ Indeed, the measurement community, largely, continues to rely on approaches to validation that – instead of seeking justice for marginalized communities – treats the sociocultural identities of these test takers as barriers of inferiority to be mitigated outside of the assessment design process. If we fail to recognize the ongoing realities of social oppression in our validation processes, the use of validity arguments simply becomes another racist tool, reproducing – rather than disrupting systems of oppression. In this talk, I discuss some of the ways in which current approaches to developing literacy assessments (and the corresponding validation processes for their use) serve to marginalize, or completely erase, the sociocultural identities and realities of racially minoritized populations. I argue for a justice-oriented, antiracist approach– rooted in critical theory – that seeks to actively disrupt our current practices rooted in the white supremacist hegemony. With this justice-oriented lens, the validation process asks the question: To what extent do the characteristics of the assessment, the assessment design/development process and/or the inferences drawn from the assessment provide evidence of antiracism?