This research was performed to see how useful dynamic testing of reading and writing would be for children with and without dyslexia and to explore the relationship between dynamic testing of...Show moreThis research was performed to see how useful dynamic testing of reading and writing would be for children with and without dyslexia and to explore the relationship between dynamic testing of reading and writing and intelligence, specifically fluid and crystallised intelligence. To research this, this research had an experimental pretest-training-posttest design with two groups—dyslexic and non-dyslexic—as well as two conditions—training and no-training. The participants were children in primary school between the ages of 7 and 9. The study consisted of two sessions: a preliminary investigation and a dynamic test. The dynamic test used was the EPALE-NL. It consists of four subtests: phonemic awareness, prosodic awareness, sounds and verbs, and context words. A significant difference was found between the group that was trained and the group that was not trained, in specific for the subtest prosodic awareness, with the trained group showing more improvement in accuracy. For the performance on the posttest by the dyslexic group and non-dyslexic group, no significant difference was found between the groups. No significant relationship was found between the gain score and fluid and crystallised intelligence. Dynamic testing of reading and writing has shown potential to be used in the classroom for its previously discovered benefits, as well as its ability to teach both dyslexics and non-dyslexics of varying intelligence.Show less
Reading and writing are important skills in life. However, children with dyslexia, a neurodevelopmental learning disorder with a genetic basis, have difficulty with these skills. Dynamic assessment...Show moreReading and writing are important skills in life. However, children with dyslexia, a neurodevelopmental learning disorder with a genetic basis, have difficulty with these skills. Dynamic assessment might be a better predictor of children’s cognitive abilities and reading and writing skills than static tests. Dynamic assessment is based on the idea that learning is a social proces and uses feedback. This study investigated the effectiveness of dynamic assessment on reading and writing performance, specifically phonemic awareness, prosodic awareness and spelling, and whether there were group differences between dyslexic and non dyslexic children, and boys and girls. The participants included 91 children aged seven to nine, with 45.1% diagnosed with dyslexia. The participants were divided in an experimental condition with a pretest-training-posttest design, and a control condition with a pretestposttest-training design. It was found that the children in the experimental condition improved more over time than the children in the control condition on prosodic awareness. No group differences were found in the effectiveness of the dynamic test. These results show that the dynamic test can be an effective tool in education for increasing the reading and writing skills in children and examining their learning potential.Show less
