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
As children start school, more and more emphasis is placed on their academic performance, their cognitive capabilities, and their intelligence. Current forms of intelligence testing – static...Show moreAs children start school, more and more emphasis is placed on their academic performance, their cognitive capabilities, and their intelligence. Current forms of intelligence testing – static testing and assessment – have been heavily scrutinised for being biased due to for example the influence of socioeconomic status (SES), leading to unequal educational outcomes. Therefore, different forms of testing – dynamic testing and assessment – are being investigated, with this study focusing on a new form of the Dynamic Screener (DS). This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of the DS to increase children’s test performance. A second aim of this study was to determine the predictive value of SES for learning potential and DS outcomes. Participants included 52 children (mean age = 13.14) in the first year of secondary school. The study employed a single-session experimental test-training-test design. Half of the children (n= 27) received a graduated prompts training between the pre-test and post-test, while the other half (n= 25) were the control group and did not receive the training. Five different tests were administered, including a test for working memory, mathematics, language, planning, and inductive reasoning. No significant results were found for trained participants’ performance in comparison with the control group on any of the subtests. Furthermore, no significant difference was found for the predictive value of SES for learning potential, nor for results on pre- versus post-test for the training group. Overall, no definitive conclusions on the effectiveness of the DS, nor on the predictive value of SES for learning potential and DS outcomes, can be drawn from the current study. Future research is needed to determine whether these results are due to the small sample size or are inherent to the DS.Show less
