Development and Preliminary Analysis of a Rubric for Culturally Responsive Research

Researchers and practitioners have struggled to promote optimal academic, behavioral, and postschool outcomes for historically marginalized youth from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. While there is a growing body of evidence-based interventions in special education, the extent to which these interventions are culturally responsive remains unexplored. Culturally responsive research (CRR) has gained increased attention in social sciences. The authors developed a 15-item rubric to evaluate the cultural responsiveness of research. They applied the rubric to six studies in transition education identified as high-quality intervention studies to determine the extent to which these met the criteria for CRR. Results from this analysis demonstrated that while none of the studies were indicative of CRR across all rubric items, strengths in question relevancy, sampling, participant description, and data collection strategies were noted.