Radical Empathy is a term that we have been using to describe the the most demanding and difficult step of our rigorous Item Alignment Examination procedure. Others use it it in different ways in different contexts. but it is an an important term for us because of it is about a very important tool in the CDP (Content Developer Professional) toolbox.
Radical Empathy is an open-minded iterative process of trying to think through an item (i.e., all the way from the beginning of the stimulus through completing the work product) from as many relevant perspectives as you can. It stands in contrast to consciously working through an item as yourself, or as you remember yourself to have been at an appropriate age.
Empathy is, of course, at the center of Radical Empathy. Reading though an item with empathy is to try to read through an item through the lens, in the shoes and wearing the hat of another person — possibly a person quite different from oneself. Obviously, the more different the person from you, the more challenging this act of empathy is.
What makes Radical Empathy so radical is its iterative and open-minded stance. The point is not merely to capture another perspective. Rather, it is to try your best to imagine the range of perspectives that one might find across the range of typical test takers. You need to take each of those perspectives and work through the item, carefully and consciously, wearing that lens, shoes and hat.
Thus, in addition to thinking from the perspective of a young person — usually from a whole different generation — you must consider different educational backgrounds, different experiences of the world, different knowledge and skills, different amounts of patience and focus, in addition to the more traditional demographic issues of gender, race/ethnicity, English language status, urbanicity, etc..
Radical empathy is about capturing as many of these perspectives as possible and carefully thinking through how these differences in perspective might influence the cognitive path that different test takers take as they work through items. However, any individual’s ability to imagine others’ perspectives is necessarily limited by their experiences with other people. Thus, efforts at Radical Empathy — such as in Step IV of Item Alignment Examination — call on content development professionals to pay attention to opportunities to learn more about others’ perspectives, to be open minded about the existence of perspectives they had not previously considered and to be humble about their confidence in their understanding of the perspectives they had considered.
We think that this is quite difficult. We think that every part of this is difficult — from staying in just a single other person’s perspective all the way through an item to maintaining that humble stance. However, because valid items elicit evidence of the targeted cognition for the range of typical test takers, we believe that this is necessary.