Article

Leveraging Measures of Students’ Prior Knowledge and Lived Experiences Toward More Personalized Culturally Responsive Assessment

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Abstract

Approaches to personalized learning emphasize the role of students’ knowledge, experiences, and interests in making classroom learning more relevant and engaging. Personalization that connects instruction to students’ home and community funds of knowledge is consistent with culturally responsive pedagogy and culturally responsive assessment approaches emphasizing that classroom content should reflect students’ cultural experiences. Measuring and accounting for variation in students’ knowledge, interests, and lived experiences has implications for personalized socioculturally responsive assessments. Research on scenario-based assessments (SBAs) of reading comprehension, which situate test questions within an overarching scenario, context, and goal, indicates that measures of topical vocabulary knowledge embedded within the assessment explain variance in comprehension scores. We extend these lines of work to examine whether measures of students’ funds of knowledge and lived experiences may further account for SBA performance and engagement, using empirical data from a geographically and racially diverse sample of approximately 1,300 middle school students. Specifically, we examined the degree to which students’ topical vocabulary knowledge and self-reported funds of knowledge predicted SBA performance and test-taking engagement. Results suggest that funds of knowledge measures could be used in conjunction with topical vocabulary and engagement measures to provide adaptive personalization toward more socioculturally responsive SBAs.

Keywords: personalized assessment, socioculturally responsive assessment, scenario-based assessment, reading comprehension, topic knowledge, funds of knowledge

How to Cite:

Sparks, J. R., Ober, T. & Lehman, B., (2026) “Leveraging Measures of Students’ Prior Knowledge and Lived Experiences Toward More Personalized Culturally Responsive Assessment”, Practical Assessment, Research, and Evaluation 30(2): 6. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/pare.3272