The purpose of this article is to review common assessment practices for Indigenous students. We start by presenting positionalities—our personal and professional background identities. Then we explain common terms associated with Indigeneity and Indigenous and Western worldviews. We describe the meaning of document analysis, the chosen qualitative research design, and we explicate the delimitations and limitations of the paper. The review of the literature revealed four main themes. First, assessment is subjugated by a Western worldview. Next, many linguistic assessment practices disadvantage Indigenous students, and language-specific and culture-laden standardized tests are often discriminatory. Last, there is a pervasive focus on cognitive assessment. We discuss how to improve assessment for Indigenous students. For example, school divisions and educators need quality professional development and knowledge about hands-on assessment, multiple intelligences, and Western versus Indigenous assessment inconsistencies. Within the past 20 years, assessment tactics for Indigenous students has remained, more or less, the same. We end with a short discussion addressing this point.
Introduction
Perso and Hayward (2020) described student assessment as “an ongoing process of gathering evidence to determine what students know, understand and can do” (p. 167). A teacher assesses students in many ways including oral responses, tests, student demonstrations, and group projects, for example. The effectiveness of assessment is important, because assessment has power and gatekeeping functions (Nagy, 2000) Assessment determines grades, class choices, pedagogy, curriculum, sometimes the location of one’s school, graduation, and college/university eligibility. Moreover, assessment practices and results can create prevailing beliefs about one’s ability to learn and succeed, academically, physically, emotionally and socially, in school and life, in general. However, not all forms of assessment are effective. Trumbull and Nelson-Barber (2019) explained that for both Indigenous and non-Indigenous students, many common assessment practices are ineffective and sometimes even detrimental.