CULTURAL VALIDATION IN PRACTICE: VALUING AND LEVERAGING PLACE AND CULTURE IN GEOSCIENCE ASSESSMENT

Geoscience assessment instruments are typically written by educators and scientists from a distinctly mainstream, Euro-American or Western perspective. In particular, when assessment deals with Earth features, processes and localities that have local cultural significance, these instruments may unintentionally contain concepts or phrases that are foreign, confusing, contradictory, or even offensive to students from different cultural traditions, such as Native Americans. This can compromise the validity of these instruments to assess learning in such student groups. The purpose of cultural validation is to minimize cultural discordance, while retaining other forms of validity and adhering to best practices for assessment design. We present an iterative method for cultural validation that we have used to produce culturally informed, place-based versions of items from the Geoscience Concept Inventory (GCI). The item content related to mountains, clouds, rain, rocks, and minerals. Cultural experts from the Blackfeet and Diné (Navajo) Nations as well as Native students and faculty from Blackfeet Community College and Arizona State University reviewed GCI items and provided recommendations for new conceptual questions. Cultural experts and Native students used the recommendations to collaboratively author new items while still following the best practices for item and concept inventory design. The new items maintain focus on geoscience concepts while incorporating the cultural and place-related contexts of the Native communities involved in this collaborative research. Some items retain the original content while others use culturally resonant Earth system components of Earth, air (wind), water, and fire (energy or life). Cultural experts reviewed the new items again to identify remaining validity issues. The result is a set of assessment items that retain content validity while maximizing cultural validity for the Native communities of the desert Southwest and northwest Montana. These items allow faculty flexibility in using the GCI while addressing cultural validity concerns with the original versions. Next steps include piloting the new items to determine reliability and developing new items that address concepts related to glaciers, volcanoes, and fossils.