Dynamic Assessment of Reading Disabilities.

Effective assessment of reading dis ability requires three kinds of infor mation on which to base appropriate remediation: the student's particular strengths and weaknesses in reading, that person's potential for progress in reading, and the conditions under which that progress can be made. Current diagnostic procedures are best at estimating the child's skills knowledge; estimates of potential remain problematic; and information about the conditions under which progress can be made is rarely collected. The work of Reuven Feuerstein (Feuerstein, Rand, and Hoffman, 1979) in intellectural assessment, however, provides insight into how we might shift the emphasis in diagnosis from looking at the child's current status to discovering the conditions under which the child will succeed in reading. Feuerstein con trasts traditional static assessment with dynamic assessment, which as sumes that cognitive behavior is plastic or modifiable and seeks to identify the conditions under which the child's ability to learn can be altered. While Feuerstein's work has been in intellectual assessment, much of his theory is particularly useful for diagnosing children having difficulty in learning to read.