Family-Interview-Based Assessment Task Design¶

Design Method · All design methods
Evidence · no claims cited

Description¶

Rather than designing generic "culturally relevant" assessment tasks in advance, this strategy has instructors (ideally the classroom teachers themselves, not only researchers) conduct family interviews to surface funds of knowledge — specific household and community practices — then extract vignettes that connect those practices to target disciplinary concepts, and co-design and iteratively test assessment tasks built around them (e.g., a "bus riding" task embedding sequencing and data reasoning, drawn from a family's actual daily commute practices).

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

Direct family interviews (phenomenological, open-ended) surfacing life history, daily routines, and community practices
Teacher involvement in conducting interviews themselves, not just receiving transcripts — the source study found this mattered for whether teachers generalized an asset-based view beyond the specific families interviewed
Iterative task testing via clinical interviews with children, refining for engagement, cultural alignment, and disciplinary validity

Constraints¶

Resource-intensive: requires university/researcher partnership time in the studied case; not yet demonstrated as sustainable for a single teacher working alone
Teachers who only received interview transcripts (rather than conducting interviews themselves) were less likely to extend an asset-based view to students whose families they had not personally interviewed

Target Learners¶

Young children (K-2 in the source study) from communities whose everyday knowledge is not typically reflected in standard disciplinary assessments

Target Learning Goals¶

Revealing computational thinking (or other disciplinary) competencies that decontextualized, standard assessment tasks under-detect

Instructions¶

Conduct open-ended family interviews to surface daily routines, community practices, and household knowledge (e.g., commuting, caregiving, budgeting).
Identify vignettes — specific chunks of practice connected to target disciplinary concepts (e.g., a bus route involves sequencing and prioritization; a medical visit involves ordered steps and tool use).
Co-design assessment tasks with teachers that embed the target concepts within these identified, community-specific contexts, using manipulatives or play scenarios where appropriate.
Pilot-test tasks via clinical interviews with children, iterating on task design for engagement, cultural alignment, and whether it actually reveals the intended disciplinary reasoning.
Have teachers themselves conduct at least some family interviews, and pair this with explicit follow-up support on generalizing an asset-based stance to families they have not personally interviewed.

(none yet linked)

Examples¶

A "bus riding" task in which children sequenced pickups of character cards using family/community reasoning (e.g., "elders can't walk long") surfaced algorithmic and data reasoning; a parallel "healthcare visit" task surfaced sequencing and tool-function knowledge.

Key Sources¶

Randall, J., Earnest, D., Thota, N., & Mensing, S. (2025). Investigating and assessing informal computational thinking in grades K-2: A funds of knowledge approach. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 34(4), 526-570. https://doi.org/10.1080/10508406.2025.2574311

Page metadata

Field	Value
`type`	`method`
`id`	`family-interview-based-assessment-task-design`
`title`	`Family-Interview-Based Assessment Task Design`
`description`	`A design process for building formative assessment tasks that reveal disciplinary competence (e.g., computational thinking) embedded in a specific community's everyday practices, by interviewing families to surface funds of knowledge before designing the task.`
`status`	`review`
`generated`	by `claude/unspecified` on `2026-08-29`
`trust`	unverified — no one has confirmed this page's content
`sources`	1 — `randall-et-al-2025`

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