Student Measure of Culturally Responsive Teaching (SMCRT)

Abstract

The Student Measure of Culturally Responsive Teaching (SMCRT) is a psychometric instrument designed to capture students’ direct perceptions of culturally responsive teaching practices within primary and secondary educational settings. Developed by Ginger L. Dickson, Heejung Chun, and Ivelisse Torres Fernandez (2016), the SMCRT addresses an empirical gap in educational measurement by shifting the evaluative lens from teacher self-report inventories to student-reported observational data. The instrument consists of 21 items organized across three primary dimensions: Diverse Teaching Practice, Cultural Engagement, and Diverse Language Affirmation. Evaluated on a Likert-type response format, the scale assesses pedagogical adaptations, multicultural validation, family integration, and linguistic inclusivity within instructional environments.

Initial validation studies involving ethnically and linguistically diverse middle school student cohorts demonstrated robust psychometric properties. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and subsequent confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported the three-factor latent model, demonstrating adequate goodness-of-fit indices (e.g., Comparative Fit Index [CFI] > .90, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] < .08). Internal consistency reliabilities across all subscales have consistently met high standards of statistical rigor, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients ranging from .73 to .88 across factors, and the overall composite scale yielding an alpha coefficient exceeding .90. Convergent and discriminant validity have been confirmed through significant correlations with constructs of school belonging, academic self-efficacy, and perceived classroom climate. As an operational tool, the SMCRT provides school psychologists, educational researchers, and instructional leaders with an ecologically valid assessment mechanism to assess educational equity, inform targeted teacher professional development, and mitigate systemic disparities in multiethnic classrooms.

Keywords

Culturally Responsive Teaching, SMCRT, Student Perceptions, Diverse Teaching Practice, Cultural Engagement, Diverse Language Affirmation, Multicultural Education, Educational Psychometrics, Classroom Climate, School Psychology

Authors

The Student Measure of Culturally Responsive Teaching was conceptualized, operationalized, and psychometrically validated by a collaborative team of researchers in counseling and educational psychology:

• Ginger L. Dickson, Ph.D. — Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, New Mexico State University. Dr. Dickson specializes in school psychology, multiculturally competent school-based interventions, and psychometric evaluation of educational climates.
• Heejung Chun, Ph.D. — Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, New Mexico State University. Dr. Chun’s research focuses on adolescent development, psychosocial adaptation among immigrant and minority youth, and quantitative research methodology in educational systems.
• Ivelisse Torres Fernandez, Ph.D. — Department of Counseling and Educational Psychology, New Mexico State University. Dr. Torres Fernandez focuses on cultural and linguistic diversity in school psychological services, social justice advocacy, and structural equity in educational assessment.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Student Measure of Culturally Responsive Teaching (SMCRT) is to assess the actual operationalization of culturally responsive pedagogical behaviors in the classroom from the phenomenological standpoint of students. Prior to the development of the SMCRT, the assessment of culturally responsive pedagogy relied almost exclusively on teacher self-efficacy scales, such as the Culturally Responsive Teaching Self-Efficacy Scale (CRTSE; Siwatu, 2007), or observational rubrics deployed by external administrative evaluators. While informative, self-report mechanisms administered to educators are susceptible to social desirability bias, self-serving attributional tendencies, and inaccurate estimations of instructional efficacy. External observational checklists often lack the longitudinal continuity required to assess everyday relational micro-interactions between instructors and students.

The SMCRT was created to position students as direct observers and stakeholders in their own learning environments. Because students spend thousands of hours interacting with pedagogical materials, instructional modalities, and classroom discourse, their aggregated perceptions provide an ecologically valid index of instructional reality. The measure enables school psychologists, educational diagnosticians, and instructional supervisors to:

• Evaluate the extent to which curricula, instructional methodologies, and interpersonal practices incorporate students’ cultural and linguistic frames of reference.
• Identify discrepancies between educators’ professed multicultural commitments and their behavioral enactment in classroom settings.
• Serve as a diagnostic feedback mechanism to guide data-driven professional learning communities (PLCs) and targeted instructional coaching.
• Empirically study the structural pathways linking culturally responsive instructional practices to downstream cognitive, affective, and behavioral student outcomes, including academic achievement, relational school connectedness, and ethnic identity affirmation.

Psychological Construct

Culturally responsive teaching represents a multidimensional educational paradigm that utilizes the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them. The SMCRT operationalizes this overarching construct into three discrete psychological and pedagogical dimensions:

1. Diverse Teaching Practice

This subscale captures the instructional and cognitive scaffolding techniques deployed by teachers to render complex academic material accessible to diverse learning profiles. Grounded in multimodal instructional theory, this dimension measures the degree to which educators utilize differentiated instructional modalities, such as visual anchors, contextual real-life illustrations, videos, guest presenters, and iterative explanations. Furthermore, it encompasses cognitive bridging—specifically the pedagogical practice of activating prior knowledge and grounding novel abstractions in students’ everyday lived experiences. It also assesses teacher-initiated family communication, recognizing parent involvement as an instructional asset that enhances student cognitive readiness.

2. Cultural Engagement

Cultural Engagement assesses the affective, relational, and curricular integration of students’ cultural heritages into the classroom ecosystem. This dimension evaluates whether instructors actively solicit information regarding students’ home lives, investigate cultural nuances, foster cross-cultural empathy and mutual respect among peers, and intentionally incorporate the intellectual, historical, and scientific contributions of minoritized cultures into the formal curriculum. It also captures the critical consciousness of the educator, including their willingness to facilitate discussions regarding cultural misunderstandings and societal inequities, thereby validating the lived sociocultural realities of historically marginalized learners.

3. Diverse Language Affirmation

Linguistic heritage is an integral facet of sociocultural identity. The Diverse Language Affirmation subscale evaluates the psychological and communicative climate established by the instructor regarding non-dominant language systems, specifically tailored in initial validations to bilingual (Spanish-English) environments. This dimension measures teacher behaviors that acknowledge, legitimize, and facilitate the functional use of students’ native languages within instructional spaces. By assessing whether teachers actively speak or permit the use of students’ home languages in the classroom, this subscale captures additive bilingualism, directly counteracting subtractive linguistic environments that marginalize non-native English speakers.

Theoretical Framework

The SMCRT is grounded in two primary theoretical traditions: Culturally Responsive Teaching as articulated by Geneva Gay (2000, 2010), and Culturally Relevant Pedagogy established by Gloria Ladson-Billings (1995). Additionally, the operational structure draws directly upon the behavioral competency indicators synthesized by Kamau O. Siwatu (2006, 2007).

Gay’s Culturally Responsive Teaching Theory

Geneva Gay defines culturally responsive teaching as the simultaneous cultivation of cultural validation, comprehensive instructional practices, multidimensional curriculum design, empowerment, and transformative emancipatory outcomes. Gay posits that formal academic learning is fundamentally social and cultural; when instructional content and methodologies are severed from the cultural epistemologies of learners, cognitive dissonance ensues. Conversely, when educators validate diverse cultural heritages, incorporate multicultural content across STEM and humanities, establish caring learning communities, and respect linguistic variations, minority students exhibit enhanced psychological safety and cognitive engagement. The SMCRT translates Gay’s foundational criteria into behavioral items that middle and high school students can evaluate.

Ladson-Billings’ Three Pillars of Culturally Relevant Pedagogy

Ladson-Billings framed culturally relevant pedagogy around three core criteria: academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. Academic success requires educators to hold high expectations and provide multifaceted scaffolding (represented in the SMCRT’s Diverse Teaching Practice). Cultural competence demands that students maintain their cultural integrity while developing academic mastery, requiring teachers to utilize cultural artifacts, family funds of knowledge, and community norms (reflected in Cultural Engagement). Critical consciousness necessitates that students critique social inequities, an element operationalized in the SMCRT through items evaluating whether teachers address cultural misunderstandings and structural representation.

Siwatu’s Competency Taxonomy

Siwatu (2006, 2007) operationalized CRT into behavioral competencies for educator preparation programs. Siwatu identified critical domains including curriculum design, classroom management, cultural self-awareness, student-teacher communication, and family-school collaboration. Dickson and colleagues (2016) used Siwatu’s competency framework as a structural blueprint, translating professional pedagogical standards into student-facing perceptual queries.

Validity

The initial validation of the SMCRT (Dickson et al., 2016) established construct, convergent, and discriminant validity using quantitative methodologies across ethnically diverse middle school student populations.

Construct Validity

Construct validity was established through sequential exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The underlying theoretical taxonomy mapping items to instructional modalities, cultural integration, and linguistic validation was empirically verified. Inter-factor correlations were moderate to strong, demonstrating that while the three subscales measure distinct components of culturally responsive pedagogy, they coalesce under a coherent macro-construct of inclusive schooling. Factor loadings for retained items consistently exceeded the .40 threshold, with the majority falling between .50 and .80, indicating high construct saturation.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was evaluated by correlating SMCRT subscale and total scores with standardized measures of classroom environment, school belonging, and academic self-efficacy. Theoretically predicted positive correlations were observed:

• School Connectedness: Students who perceived higher levels of culturally responsive teaching exhibited significantly greater feelings of belonging and attachment to their school community (r values ranging from .45 to .62, p < .001).
• Academic Self-Efficacy: Diverse Teaching Practice significantly predicted students’ beliefs in their academic capabilities, demonstrating that multimodal instructional scaffolding enhances learner competence beliefs.
• Teacher-Student Relationship Quality: High scores on Cultural Engagement and Diverse Language Affirmation correlated positively with perceptions of teacher caring and relational trust.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was evidenced by low-to-negligible correlations between SMCRT dimensions and unrelated structural variables, such as student grade level or objective school building size, ensuring that the instrument captures classroom-level instructional practices rather than broad demographic characteristics.

Reliability

The psychometric evaluation of the SMCRT demonstrates strong internal consistency reliability across its total score and individual subscales. In the foundational validation sample of middle school students (Dickson et al., 2016), the reliability coefficients were determined as follows:

• Total Composite Scale: Cronbach’s α = .91, indicating strong overall internal consistency and low measurement error for the aggregate construct.
• Diverse Teaching Practice Subscale (11 items): Cronbach’s α = .88. This high internal consistency reflects the structural coherence of items assessing pedagogical differentiation, multimodal instruction, and parent communication.
• Cultural Engagement Subscale (7 items): Cronbach’s α = .82. Items measuring teacher interest in culture, home-life inquiries, and cross-cultural respect yielded consistent inter-item correlations.
• Diverse Language Affirmation Subscale (3 items): Cronbach’s α = .78 to .84 across demographic subsets. Despite having only three items, the scale demonstrated stable reliability due to high inter-item covariance regarding native language use in the classroom.

Additionally, composite reliability (CR) metrics calculated via structural equation modeling corroborated these values, with composite reliabilities exceeding .80 across factors. Test-retest reliability across short-term assessment intervals has shown stability in student evaluations across academic quarters, provided instructional personnel remain constant.

Factor Analysis

The structural configuration of the SMCRT was developed and confirmed through a rigorous two-step factor analytic framework involving separate calibration and validation samples.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the scale development phase, an initial pool of candidate items derived from the literature was administered to a calibration sample. Principal Axis Factoring (PAF) accompanied by oblique rotation (Promax) was utilized to accommodate expected intercorrelations among pedagogical dimensions. Initial eigenvalues, scree plot inspection, and parallel analysis converged on a three-factor solution accounting for substantial variance. Items exhibiting weak primary factor loadings (< .40) or problematic cross-loadings (> .30 on multiple factors with insufficient delta) were iteratively removed, resulting in a streamlined 21-item instrument.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

The three-factor model was subsequently cross-validated with an independent validation sample using maximum likelihood estimation. The three-factor latent structure demonstrated good empirical fit to the observed data:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .92 to .94 (exceeding standard acceptable cutoffs of .90).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .91 to .93.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .058 (90% CI [.051, .065]), satisfying the threshold for acceptable approximation error (< .08).
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .051.

Competing models, including a unidimensional single-factor model and a two-factor model combining Cultural Engagement with Language Affirmation, yielded significantly worse fit metrics, confirming the distinct structural validity of the three hypothesized dimensions.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational characteristics, administration protocols, and scoring structure of the SMCRT are detailed below:

• Instrument Name: Student Measure of Culturally Responsive Teaching (SMCRT)
• Test Type: Student-report survey / Psychometric rating scale
• Target Population: Upper elementary, middle school, and high school students (grades 4 through 12). Primarily validated among culturally and linguistically diverse youth.
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or secure digital assessment. Group or individual administration.
• Administration Time: Approximately 10 to 15 minutes.
• Item Count: 21 items total:
  • Diverse Teaching Practice: 11 items
  • Cultural Engagement: 7 items
  • Diverse Language Affirmation: 3 items
• Response Format: Likert-type rating scale, typically formatted as a 5-point frequency or agreement continuum (e.g., 1 = Strongly Disagree / Never, 2 = Disagree / Rarely, 3 = Neutral / Sometimes, 4 = Agree / Often, 5 = Strongly Agree / Always).
• Scoring and Interpretation:
  • All items are positively phrased; no reverse scoring is required.
  • Subscale scores are computed by calculating the arithmetic mean or raw sum of the corresponding items.
  • A Total Culturally Responsive Teaching composite score is obtained by averaging across all 21 items (ranging from 1.00 to 5.00).
  • Higher mean scores reflect greater student-perceived implementation of culturally responsive pedagogical behaviors.
  • Data can be disaggregated at the classroom level (to evaluate specific teachers) or aggregated at the grade/school level to monitor system-wide cultural responsiveness.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Student Measure of Culturally Responsive Teaching was published in 2016 in the journal Assessment for Effective Intervention (first published online in late 2015). The copyright for the academic publication belongs to the Hammill Institute on Disabilities and SAGE Publications.

The instrument is widely utilized in non-profit academic research, school psychology dissertations, and school-district internal evaluations. Educational researchers and practitioners wishing to implement the SMCRT within clinical, evaluative, or scholarly contexts should reference the original validation article (Dickson et al., 2016) and secure permissions through SAGE Publications or directly contact the lead authors for instructional research utilization. There are generally no fees required for non-commercial educational research applications, provided appropriate scholarly attribution is maintained.

References

• Dickson, G. L., Chun, H., & Fernandez, I. T. (2016). The development and initial validation of the Student Measure of Culturally Responsive Teaching. Assessment for Effective Intervention, 41(3), 141–154. https://doi.org/10.1177/1534508415604879
• Gay, G. (2000). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice. Teachers College Press.
• Gay, G. (2002). Culturally responsive teaching in special education for ethnically diverse students: Setting the stage. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 15(6), 613–629. https://doi.org/10.1080/0951839022000014349
• Gay, G. (2010). Culturally responsive teaching: Theory, research, and practice (2nd ed.). Teachers College Press.
• Ladson-Billings, G. (1995). Toward a critical race theory of education. Teachers College Record, 97(1), 47–68. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146819509700104
• Siwatu, K. O. (2006, March). The development of the culturally responsive teaching standards: Implications for teacher education [Paper presentation]. Annual meeting of the Texas National Association of Multicultural Education, Lubbock, TX.
• Siwatu, K. O. (2007). Preservice teachers’ culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy and outcome expectancy beliefs. Teaching and Teacher Education, 23(7), 1086–1101. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2006.07.011

Items of the Scale