A Sociocultural Perspective on Opportunity to Learn

The field of psychometrics has been predominant in work on testing and assessment. For the most part, psychometrics has been strongly influenced by traditional psychological assumptions about themind and learning.Work that takes a sociocultural perspective has played a much smaller role and has heretofore made little contact with psychometrics. This chapter discusses contributions such a sociocultural perspective has tomake to issues of assessment and testing,with a focus on an expanded notion of opportunity to learn (OTL). Ensuring that all learners have had equal OTL is both an ethical prerequisite for fair assessment and a solid basis on which to think about educational reforms thatwill ensure that all children can succeed at school. It is also a point at which mutually informing discussion can occur between people working in psychometrics and those working on sociocultural approaches to learning. 

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