Incorporating Ethnographic-Based Techniques to Enhance Assessments of Culturally Diverse Students' Written Exposition

This article focuses on the need to include ethnographic-based approaches in the writing assessments of culturally and linguistically diverse populations. The inclusion of such approaches can help teachers gain a deeper understanding of the complexities of learning for all students and realize how students' social and cultural lives mingle with the assessment process and with their academic learning. In Part 1 of the article, I describe an investigation of the assessment of students' informative essays using a single-method, holistic approach. English teachers rated essays written by eight ethnically diverse fifth- and sixth-grade students using an array of rhetorical and linguistic measures - including overall quality, coherence, sentence-level mechanics, and use of an organizational structure. Findings indicate that, within this paradigm of assessment, culturally and linguistically diverse students may be penalized for preferring rhetorical patterns that differ from the mainstream academic patterns rewarded in schools. In Part 2, I describe an investigation of the assessment of the same eight students' informal informative essays using a multifaceted approach, including ethnographic techniques and micro- and macrolevel text analyses. Findings suggest that the multifaceted approach provided a more accurate picture of the students' expository language resources. In the final section, I demonstrate how the ethnographic-based techniques provide illustrative evaluation data useful for forging a fit among the language resources and functions of writing for culturally and linguistically diverse students and their assessment and instructional needs.