Date: Thursday, May 28, 2026
Hello, my name is David Sul and, for the past five years, I have taught a QuantCrit methods course for the University of San Francisco School of Education. I would like to share my rationale behind the claim: Culturally specific assessment can be the engine that drives QuantCrit-informed STEM evaluations.
A review of the American Evaluation Association’s Topical Interest Groups reveals at least three well-established traditions grounded in relativist approaches:
Despite their rich history, quantitative methods have lacked equivalent relativist frameworks.
David Gillborn, Paul Warmington, and Sean Demack introduced QuantCrit in their 2018 Race Ethnicity and Education article, offering a five-tenet structure for conducting the seemingly oxymoronic: quantitative research and evaluation from a relativist perspective.
QuantCrit’s principles can be applied to any area of research, including the construction of culturally specific assessments, a form of culturally responsive assessment first described by Stafford Hood in a 1998 Journal of Negro Education article. Each QuantCrit tenet identifies a condition that culturally specific assessment addresses directly:
What does this work look like in real life? Rubric-based assessment locates individuals and communities along stages of development and provides a perspective for understanding what should happen next. In culturally specific assessment development, communities name the objects of assessment, the stages of development, describe them in their own language, and define the developmental trajectory from within their own context, on their own terms. In this way, the community becomes the author of the categories and the numbers. For a worked example of a culturally specific assessment framework constructed through collaborative processes with Latinx communities, see the article Diego Domínguez and I contributed to the 2024 issue of New Directions for Evaluation.
With culturally specific assessment producing the numbers that QuantCrit-informed evaluators need, the evaluation field is well-positioned for a new direction. Evaluators working in well-established areas such as identity and community-centered evaluation, participatory methods, and context-specific practice are great candidates to bring their skills and commitments to culturally specific assessment in support of transforming QuantCrit-informed STEM evaluation.
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