Poehner & Lantolf’s Dynamic Assessment in the Language Classroom

After reading this article, my understanding of Dynamic Assessment (DA) is that it’s a form of intervention between the student and the teacher. In this form, the child’s response to learning is taken into account in the testing situation, which is the whole picture of how the child came into the conclusion. Dynamic Assessment is not a traditional form of assessment; it considers Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), and the mediation given during the assessment. Vygotsky’s ZPD brings the student to a learning zone where the child learns to take the assessment with some form of mediation. ZPD’s goal is to allow the child to learn by taking into consideration their current performance, and performance with help of the teacher. Mediation is almost like scaffolding, but the examiner is looking to induce change where it is believed that the student will apply what was learned to another situation. Dynamic Assessments brings out what is beginning to mature, and it keeps the learning and testing situations together. In DA, the questions that are asked are to allow the child to notice what has been difficult to learn, and that is to bring them to their ZPD. What seemed to be impossible can be possible with Dynamic Assessment, especially since you raise the student’s learning through mediation.

I’d be interested to view a video on how Dynamic Assessment is done in a primary immersion setting. Like I said many times before, the assessments that my students take, the language is too complicated from them. If I tested the students through this approach, since most of my students are not language delayed in their first language, according to DA, they’d do well on their assessment through my mediation.