Sponsored by the University of Nevada at Las Vegas’ (UNLV) College of Education, 2019 will mark the third annual CARE conference. This event brings together scholars from around the U.S. and abroad in order to present scholarship related to a variety of contexts, including theory, practice, empirical research, and conceptual advancement. All presentations will address subjects specifically related to education, broadly defined, such as P-12 teacher education, higher education, educational psychology, adult education, special education, school counseling, school psychology, school climate, policy, TESL, literacy, online learning, educational technology, and others.

We have chosen the theme of Language Testing and Social Justice as a focus for the 41st annual Language Testing Research Colloquium. It is a particularly relevant theme for a conference to be held in Atlanta, Georgia, home of Dr. Martin Luther King, Junior, and a major center of the Civil Rights movement in the USA. We also want to recognize the 20th anniversary of Elana Shohamy’s landmark 1998 article Critical Language Testing and Beyond, in which she challenged language testers to “actively follow the uses and consequences of language tests, and offer assessment models which are more educational, democratic, and ethical in order to minimize misuses.”

Multiple subthemes can be derived from this year’s theme that connect with the research interests and agendas of many AERA members and others participating in our Annual Meeting. A few examples include:

1) The relationship between a “post-truth” politics and the exacerbation of racial, class, and gender inequality in education policy and practice from pre-K through higher education.

2) Strategies to address the marginalization of the empirical research and knowledge of our field to ensure that it informs the development of professionals and their practice.

3) The relationship between the measures used to evaluate students, educators, schools, universities and workforce development in a standardized-test-driven system and the evidence on developmental psychology, culturally relevant ways of knowing, and the racial hierarchy that too often defines our field.