Strategic responses to anti-DEI legislation: The promise of culturally responsive assessments

Follmer et al. (2024) highlight the negative consequences of dismantling diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies and practices, including reduced employee preparedness for diversityrelated issues, diminished organizational effectiveness, and a decline in the quality of employee selection processes.Across education and employment contexts, research indicates that traditional assessments can be biased (Leong et al., 2019;Pennock-Romn, 1993).This bias results in increased barriers to career opportunities and ongoing organizational inequities, such as hiring and staffing discrimination, stemming from applicant evaluation bias against historically marginalized groups (Hardy et al., 2022).The authors propose strategies for supporting DEI efforts despite legal challenges and urge industrial and organizational psychologists to advocate for continued investment in DEI programs through research and practice.Building on their call to action, we argue for incorporating culturally responsive assessment (CRA) across the human resources (HR) lifecycles to counteract anti-DEI legislation effectively.CRA is a relatively new assessment design approach gaining traction among educational scholars (Montenegro & Jankowski, 2017;Walker et al., 2023) and has yet to receive much attention from organizational researchers.The goal of CRA is to integrate test takers' diverse cultural backgrounds into assessment content, format, or scoring, enhancing the assessment's validity and equity for test takers (Walker et al., 2023).Thus, we recommend CRAs as a method to counteract the negative outcomes associated with anti-DEI legislation.Within the HR lifecycle, employee selection and assessment processes may be particularly susceptible to the implications of anti-DEI legislation.Traditional methods for addressing group differences in assessment scores, such as differential item functioning or equating analyses, handle biases by adjusting item-level and scoring data after an assessment is administered.However, these methods do not address the content of assessments to reduce bias from the outset.Moreover, these methods require demographic data collection, which anti-DEI efforts seek to prevent.Alternatively, CRAs address inequity and bias during assessment development rather than postadministration.Some key features of CRAs include considering the diverse groups served, using inclusive language for intersecting identities, taking test-taker differences into account during planning, and employing suitable assessment tools and methodologies (Montenegro & Jankowski, 2017).Therefore, CRAs should, in theory, make the assessment experience feel inclusive and fair for test takers (Bennett, 2023), an advantage not provided by statistical adjustments.Consider the development of a teacher licensure assessment as an illustrative example of applying CRA strategies.First, test developers can gather insights from diverse stakeholders, including teachers, students, parents, and administrators.Second, surveys can then enhance the