Testing Bias Impacts Educational Assessment

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Recommended: Culture-oriented teaching

Cultural bias is when something is unfair for someone because of his/her culture or ethnicity. More specifically, cultural bias in testing is when someone from a certain culture does worse on a test because he/she is unfamiliar with terms or can’t relate to the test because of his/her culture. In fact, according to Robert Drummond and Karyn Jones, test were, at one time, criticized for cultural bias, gender bias, unfairness to minority groups, and unfairness to groups with disabilities. Unfortunately, most tests that are given in the United States assumes that everyone who is taking the test has had exposure to white, middle class background. This means that a minority might take a test a do poorly on it simply because he/she doesn’t understand what is being asked. Sometimes this comes from language barriers, and sometimes it’s because they don’t understand some terminology. For example, my mom was born and raised in Scotland and so she has spoken English all of her life. However, when she moved to the United States when she was 19, she had a hard time understanding some of the peopl...

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