Teacher candidates’ perspectives’ on accessing students’ funds of knowledge in literacy education using inventories: A class-based research project

Because teacher education programs stress the importance of connecting students’ funds of knowledge to curriculum making, teaching skills to teacher-candidates (TCs) on how to do so remains an important part of their professional education and development. An in-class research project was conducted to create a questionnaire to examine TCs’ belief regarding curriculum making with children’s funds of knowledge in mind. TCs (N=109) followed DeVeillis’ (2003) steps for scale development to generate an item pool and then served as the development sample for the questionnaire (response rate: 16.5%). Results suggest the instrument suffers from restriction of range and large intercorrelations between items. Suggestions for improving the questionnaire are provided, as well as implications for future research with TCs.