As a consequence of increased migration and globalization during recent decades, several young Europeans of today’s multicultural society would identify themselves as multi-ethnic and multilingual individuals. However, European education systems often fail to recognize and utilize the competencies and potentials of multi-ethnic minority students. As a matter of fact, addressing issues of equity and social justice in education is a critical concern when grades, standardized test scores and dropout rates among other measures of academic success reveal an achievement gap between ethnic minority groups and majority groups.

During the last decades, sociocultural and hermeneutic approaches to educational assessment have argued that issues of equity and fairness in assessment cannot be solved exclusively with technical solutions. Thus, the psychometric notion of reliability as the only way to accentuate ethical and epistemological assessment issues have been challenged in favour of an understanding of equity and fairness as related to validity, i.e. to considerations of justifiable interpretations, decisions and actions in relation to assessment practices.

Although there has been a shift of focus in the field of educational assessment from merely technical issues to holistic views of assessment and learning practices that conceptualise equity in terms of access to learning, this article argues that the social, intersubjective dimensions of educational assessment still has not gained adequate attention within educational assessment research and practice.

Employing the concept of intersubjective recognition, the overarching aim of this article is to reconceptualise the notions of fairness and equity in educational assessment. With support of theories on intersubjective recognition mainly inspired by social philosopher Axel Honneth and sociologists Carl-Göran Heidegren and Stephan Voswinkel, the article will propose an outline for a conceptual framework, monitoring fairness and equity in educational assessment in multicultural learning contexts.

The framework holds three objectives: first, exploring the field of educational assessment on a conceptual and not on a technical level, the framework illustrates the potential of an outside perspective such as the theory of intersubjective recognition that originally belongs to a philosophical sphere but recently have been employed in educational research, to illuminate social processes that have been invisible for educational assessment research and practice. Thus, the framework intends to shed light upon the broader social contexts that impact on the actions of teachers and students in social interaction, by linking socially embedded relations between macro structures and micro levels. Secondly, conceptualising assessments as intersubjective recognition actions that have ethical and epistemological consequences for the actors involved, the framework aims at providing conceptual tools for moral and epistemic evaluation of assessment actions with respect to the quality of recognition in intersubjective relations. Thirdly, the implications of an intersubjective understanding of educational assessment for the interpretation of disparity in educational achievement among different student groups, will be discussed addressing fairness as an issue related to validity and construct definition, rather as an exclusively technical concern.

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