Annotated Bibliography 3&4

Skiba, Ph.D, Russell J., Lakeisha D. Bush, and Kimberly Knesting Ph.D.. " Culturally Competent Assessment: More Than Nonbiased Test." Journal of Child and Family Studies 11.1 (2002): 61-65. Print.

In this Article Culturally Competent Assessment: More Than Nonbiased Test, Skiba, Lakeisha, and Knesting; address several different aspects that are currently being debated and researched on disproportionality in minority groups. The study of test bias, examiner/teacher bias as well as item bias are directly discussed in this article. The authors point out that through their research many times test bias is small and often isolated factor and may not contribute to the larger misrepresentation of minorities in special education. However, item bias along with the bias of the examiner is contributing more to minority disproportionality. The individual items addressed in an assessment has been seen as bias due to underling socioeconomic factors that effect the student. These factors have been noted as hard to eliminate in the goal to create an unbiased test. However by helping those who administer and evaluate the test results to become unbiased is currently being used to more closely represent minorities in special education. This article aids to my research by shedding a new perspective on what factors are contributing to the disproportion of minorities.

Cross, TL. "Disproportionality in child welfare." Child Welfare 87.2 (2008): 11-20. CINAHL with Full Text. EBSCO. Web. 10 Mar. 2011.

Cross, in her article “ Disproportionality in child welfare” addresses how disproportionality is effecting her field of Child Welfare. In child welfare services Cross points out that there is an equal representation of both white and ethnically diverse families who are considered a threat to child maltreatment, however in many situations over threes times as many African American, and American Indian children are placed into child care over white children. Cross relates this statistic to the idea that many social workers are resting their decisions on underlying prejudices that they are not aware of. She states that many times when a social worker investigates whether or not a home is safe for a child they revert back to considering whether or not this environment is “safe” in general, they many times disregard different family and social communities that offer a greater environment for the children to be raised in opposed to foster care. This article speaks to my research in addressing a different aspect of minority disproportionality. For there is be evidence of disproportional treatment of minorities in other child centric environments out side of schools leads me to believe that there maybe more behind hidden and underlying prejudices that previously thought.