Dynamic Approaches to Psychoeducational Assessment

A Selective Synthesis of the Experimental Literature on Dynamic Assessment

“…Several authors (e.g., Campione & Brown, 1987;Elliot & Lauchlan, 1997;Feuerstein, 1980;Haywood, Brown, & Wingenfeld, 1990;Kirschembaum, 1998;Lidz, 1996) suggest that traditional intelligence or aptitude tests (i.e., tests that measure unassisted performance on global measures of academic aptitude) underestimate general ability. That is, static or traditional approaches to assessment of aptitude typically provide little feedback or practice before testing, and therefore performance on such measures often reflects the student's misunderstanding of instructions more than their ability to perform the task (Brown & Ferrara, 1999;Campbell & Carlson, 1995;Hamers, Hessels, & Pennings, 1996;Haywood et al, 1990). One possible alternative or supplement to traditional assessment is to measure a child's performance when given examiner assistance.…”

“…Traditional approaches of DA include learning potential assessment (e.g., Budoff, 1987a), testing-the-limits (Carlson & Wiedl, 1979;Swanson, 1995), mediated assessment (e.g., Feuerstein, 1980), and assisted learning and transfer (e.g., Bransford, Delclos, Vye, Burns, & Hasselbring, 1987;Campione, Brown, Ferrara, Jones, & Steinberg, 1985). Although DA is a term used to characterize a number of distinct approaches (see Carlson & Wiedl, 1979;Haywood et al, 1990;Palincsar, Brown, & Campione, 1991;Speece, Cooper, & Kibler, 1990), two common features of this approach are to determine the learner's potential for change when given assistance (e.g., Campione & Brown, 1987) and to provide a prospective measure of performance change independent of assistance (e.g., Embretson, 1987 [Note: Unless otherwise indicated, citations in the text refer to work found in the references proper: "Toward development of a psychometric approach."]). Unlike traditional testing procedures, score changes due to examiner intervention are not viewed as threatening task validity.…”

Effectiveness of Hybrid Dynamic Assessment in L2 learners' descriptive writing development

“…The assessment in DA is not separate from instruction, but they come together and a mixture of these two results in a better outcome. In other words, as Haywood, Brown, and Wingenfeld (1990) put it, DA emphasizes the optimal performance under some specified conditions, rather than simply identifying the current level of performance.…”

Does central coherence relate to the cognitive performance of children with autism in dynamic assessments?

“…It has been argued that many of these children do poorly on standardised, static tests of ability because they do not have the pre-requisite cultural exposure and cognitive training needed to complete the tasks successfully (Feuerstein et al, 1979). Some studies have indicated that assessments of children with learning disabilities and social disadvantage based on dynamic assessment approaches can yield estimates of abilities that are higher than those based on the children’s performance on standardised/static IQ tests (Feuerstein et al, 1979; Haywood et al, 1990; Tzuriel, 1995; Hessels, 1997).…”

“…For children with autism, weakness in central coherence is one such cognitive factor that could potentially undermine the validity and utility of information obtained from the use of dynamic assessments. While the utility of DA for children with learning difficulties and for those from disadvantaged backgrounds has been widely reported (Haywood et al, 1990; Hessels, 1997), empirical studies of DA methodologies in assessing the learning abilities of children with autism are lacking.…”