What is Racial Formations

The study of racial-ethnic group differences on educational tests has yielded a substantial body of research internationally in the last decade. In this chapter, I map current research about racial-ethnic minorities and educational testing in the English-language educational assessment literature. From an initial search yielding 420 articles, 78 were identified for further analysis. The results show that (1) although researchers often do not define terms like race or ethnicity, the socially constructed nature of race and ethnicity is assumed (2) racial-ethnic group categorizations shift depending upon national context and (3) comparative studies can result in focusing attention on racial-ethnic groups while drawing attention away from testing policies that are implicated in creating such results. Such results underscore how crossnational literature reviews can enrich studies of race-ethnicity and educational test performance.