In the 1920s and 1930s, Lev Vygotsky, a sociocultural theorist, developed the concept of dynamic assessment (DA). Vygotsky believed that assessment should not be a static process that relies solely on numerical scores or a snapshot of a student’s knowledge at a point in time. Dynamic Assessment: Assessment should focus on students’ learning (Lidz & Gindis, 2003). They assert that learning occurs at different levels. The first level surrounds students’ independence (Peña et al., 2014). The second level of learning, termed the zone of proximal development by Vygotsky, highlights students ‘ potential (Daneshfar & Moharami, 2018). Dynamic assessment is a structured evaluative process that includes a pretest, a mediated learning experience, and a post-test, allowing evaluators to assess current performance and the capacity to learn new material (Peña et al., 2014).
Dynamic assessment helps to address the limitations of standardized tools, by utilizing a test–teach–re-test model. Incorporating mediated learning experiences provides insight into students’ responsiveness and informs culturally sensitive evaluation practices (Lidz & Peña, 1996; Gutierrez-Clellen & Peña, 2001; Peña et al., 2014). Specifically, teaching phonology, vocabulary, syntactic structures, and pragmatic skills that students may not have had previous exposure to, as well as vocabulary.
Dynamic assessment is particularly valued over traditional standardized assessments because it evaluates students ‘ learning, not their prior knowledge. Dynamic assessments are a type of qualitative assessment that has been known to reduce the incidence of bias in the evaluative process (Kearney, 2023). This reduces bias and provides a more equitable evaluation process for students from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds (Orellana et al., 2019). A central component of Dynamic Assessment is the test–teach–re-test model, because it enables clinicians to differentiate between language difficulties resulting from an actual disorder versus those arising from limited exposure or experience (Lidz & Peña, 1996; Gutierrez-Clellen & Peña, 2001; Peña et al, 2014). Within this model, mediated learning experiences, such as prompts, modeling, and scaffolding, are integrated to observe children’s instruction and their capacity to acquire targeted skills (Peña et al., 2001; Peña et al.,2014). Another form of Dynamic Assessment involves prompting, which fades based on the student’s level of mastery.
Developing Minds Inc. 