Do interviews really assess students’ knowledge?

Interviews are important assessment means. Most studies assume that interviews can be used to assess a conceptual framework that remains relatively stable in the interview situation. We provide evidence here that questions this assumption. Using a situated cognition framework, we reanalysed pre‐test and post‐test interviews from a large classroom study. Our analyses show that cognition, rather than being a stable property of individuals, is a dynamic process which changes in different ways over shorter and longer time scales. We also observed considerable interactions between the complexity of the questions asked by the interviewer and the complexity of cognitive processes that interviewees enacted. Finally, our analysis reveals moments of breakdown when interviewers’ and interviewees’ expectations of the situation were mismatched. Implications are drawn for organizing interviews intended to elicit information about cognition.