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.

History and Theory

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. 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.

In Practice

Dynamic assessment is an interactive approach to psychological or psychoeducational assessment that embeds intervention within the assessment procedure. Most typically, there is a pretest then an intervention and then a posttest. This allows the assessor to determine the response of the client or student to the intervention. There are a number of different dynamic assessment procedures that have a wide variety of content domains.
There are two major approaches to DA: Interactionist and Interventionist approaches. Interventionist approach is implemented in two formats: sandwich and cake formats.