Dynamic assessment

Dynamic assessment is a kind of interactive assessment used in education and the helping professions. Dynamic assessment is a product of the research conducted by developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky. It identifies a child's learning potential as well as his or her skills. The dynamic assessment procedure accounts for the amount and nature of examiner investment. It is highly interactive and process-oriented It has become popular among educators, psychologists, and speech and language pathologists. It is an alternative to the wide range of standard IQ tests. Dynamic assessment is a kind of interactive assessment used in education and the helping professions. Dynamic assessment is a product of the research conducted by developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky. It identifies a child's learning potential as well as his or her skills. The dynamic assessment procedure accounts for the amount and nature of examiner investment. It is highly interactive and process-oriented It has become popular among educators, psychologists, and speech and language pathologists. It is an alternative to the wide range of standard IQ tests. Vygotsky's 1933 notion of the zone of proximal development served as the basis of his proposal to measure potential development using moderately assisted problem solving and to measure actual development from the child's independent problem solving. The difference between the higher level of potential and the lower level of actual development indicates the zone of proximal development. Combination of these two indexes provides a more informative indicator of psychological development than assessment of actual development alone. The ideas on the zone of development were later developed in a number of psychological and educational theories and practices. Most notably, they were developed under the banner of dynamic assessment that focuses on the testing of learning and developmental potential (for instance, in the work of H. Carl Haywood and Reuven Feuerstein). Dynamic assessment also received considerable support in the recent revisions of cognitive developmental theory by Joseph Campione, Ann Brown, and John D. Bransford and in theories of multiple intelligences by Howard Gardner and Robert Sternberg.