EXTENDING TRADITIONAL DIAGNOSIS: THE DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT OF READING ABILITIES

Abstract Dynamic assessment uses a response‐to‐instruction paradigm to complement traditional diagnostic assessment of word recognition and comprehension. The process helps the examiner to predict appropriate remedial intervention by exploring a student's responses to a series of “instructional episodes” in an interactive teaching‐learning relationship. Dynamic and traditional (or static) assessment differ in orientation (process vs. product), procedure (response to instruction vs. enumeration of existing abilities), and interpretation (patterns of response to instruction vs. indices, e.g., percentiles or stanines). A dynamic approach to assessment provides the opportunity to evaluate systematically the instructional factors that influence reading performance. Traditional conceptualizations of reading assessment suggest a procedure in which an unbiased examiner administers a test instrument in a standardized format, with the entire process in a neutral (often called “clinical") setting (Fuchs & Fuchs, 198...