Use empathy interviews as a natural, informal conversation to uncover students' experiences, emotions, and unmet needs in mathematics learning¶

Strategy · All strategies
Evidence · 2 claims (2 for) · 1 study (1 qualitative), q2 · 0 of 1 report an effect size · 2 claims rest on one study

Description¶

Empathy interviews, drawn from the design thinking tradition, are conducted as natural, informal conversations whose aim is "to reveal the user's perspective of their experiences and feelings, and to identify their unmet needs within a given context." Unlike diagnostic or clinical interviews, they are not intended to fix, assess, or remediate the user's experience. In the professional development, teachers interviewed their own students with disabilities, family members, or colleagues, and facilitators coached design teams to attend to the emotions captured in the interviews.

Design Implications¶

Context¶

Requirements¶

• Interviewers take the role of listeners rather than assessors; interviews focus on emotions and narratives about experiences

Constraints¶

• The article cautions that empathy can serve as a mechanism for pity or further oppression without mindfulness of differently positioned power

Target Learners¶

• Students with disabilities in mathematics classrooms; also teachers and families as interview users

Target Learning Goals¶

• Understanding students' experiences and emotions in mathematics learning; building relationships; informing instructional redesign

Claims¶

• Educators in a UDL Math and Design Thinking professional development attributed shifts in their beliefs and practices to empathy, both as a value and as a practice of empathy interviews [+W]
• Classroom teachers spontaneously adopted empathy interviews outside the design thinking cycle, using them with students and families for relationship building [+W]

Related Strategies¶

• Conduct empathy interviews to understand user experiences with technology
• Conduct one-on-one empathy interviews with open-ended questions to uncover root causes of system challenges
• Conduct empathy interviews as story-based conversations in comfortable, student-chosen settings
• Using Empathy Interviews for Family Engagement
• Five-step empathy interview exercise for teachers designing inclusive computing pathways
• Empathy for Educators
• Adopt a dialogic format to align student and teacher perspectives on instructional quality within schools

Examples¶

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Key Sources¶

• Rachel Lambert, Kara Imm. (2026). Teachers rehumanizing mathematics for students with disabilities; the role of empathy. Instructional Science. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-025-09753-4