Toward Fairer and More Equitable Numeracy Measurement: Improvements to the Quantitative Reasoning for College Science Assessment

Numeracy has become an increasingly important 21st-century skill that, due to the relationship between math and science, is often formally developed at the college level in general education science courses. These courses serve a diverse group of students, many of whom have historically experienced science teaching, curriculum, and assessment on the margins. The well-documented biases of assessments in particular against Individuals of Color (IoC) have inspired us to approach numeracy for social justice in our work from this angle, and in this paper, we detail our efforts to revise our validated numeracy assessment to ensure it more fairly and equitably measures student knowledge, with particular attention to minimizing bias against students from racial/ethnic groups that have been marginalized in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). We also discuss the implications of our work for assessment designers and describe why our approach to test creation is necessary precursor work to addressing the under-representation of IoC in STEM and science-related fields more broadly.