Dynamic Assessment: A Journey

By Dr Jane Yeomans

Why Dynamic Assessment? This blog aims to give a flavour of my DA ‘journey’ and to reflect on why is has been an important part of my practice for nearly ten years.

I came to Educational Psychology via a rather circuitous route. I never did an undergraduate degree in psychology (or anything else, after spectacularly failing my A Levels in 1974!). This meant that although I studied Psychology later in life and obtained GBR, I didn't have the basic 'grounding' in first principles and theories. So cognitive psychology was a bit of a closed book and at the time when I trained in the early 1990s the main exposure to this branch of psychology was being shown how to administer psychometric tests of ability/IQ. As a newly qualified EP I was employed in a Local Authority service that was at the forefront of promoting curriculum based, criterion referenced approaches to assessment which meant that psychometric ability tests were not routinely used. The result of this early career experience was that avoidance was my only strategy for considering factors such as cognitive abilities.

That all changed in 2001 when I signed up for a one day 'taster' in Dynamic Assessment. I had become aware of this approach as a result of being a fieldwork supervisor and being very puzzled by some of the tasks that my trainee was being asked to undertake. So off I went to this taster day, wondering if I would be underwhelmed by the whole approach. At the end of that first day I was bowled over by just how much sense it made. I have to mention here that the course presenter, Ruth Deutsch, was an inspirational and knowledgeable teacher whose input made an enormous impression on me. The taster day I had attended was actually Day 1 of an 8 day course so I immediately signed up for the other 7 days!

“One of the most striking elements is that I now have a language to talk about cognition that doesn’t have to involve scores, or is based on a theory of fixed abilities that has limited reliability and validity for many of the children and young people with whom I work”

Reflecting back to those first impressions, and forward to where I am now, what is it about DA that has made it a frequent and consistent aspect of my practice for almost 10 years? One of the most striking elements is that I now have a language to talk about cognition that doesn’t have to involve scores, or is based on a theory of fixed abilities that has limited reliability and validity for many of the children and young people with whom I work. I now understand much more clearly the cognitive functions (thinking skills) that underpin the subject based curriculum. Being trained in Feuerstein’s approach to DA has helped me to make sure that these cognitive functions are generalised and applied, via the transcendence characteristic of mediation.

The foundation of DA, which is about the flexible and changing nature of cognition also provides me with an optimistic approach to applying my psychology. The notion of static or fixed abilities has never appealed because it seemed to me that there is a danger of ‘pigeonholing’ a child or young person. Again, Feuerstein’s approach has been very influential here, because his work arose from the realisation that traumatised learners (in Feuerstein’s case these learners were Holocaust survivors) find it difficult to engage in higher order thinking because their energy is being used to survive and recover from the trauma.

The interactive nature of DA is another important element, particularly in relation to the affective factors that can impact on performance in an assessment situation. For example, impulsive responding can be mediated in DA; in contrast, in a standardised assessment context the tester usually has to accept the first answer the pupil gives. In addition to the affective factors that might impact on static test results, there are other factors and contexts that can be addressed much more successfully via an interactive approach; for example, linguistic or cultural differences, particular difficulties such as a hearing or vision impairment (static, norm referenced tests are often not standardised for use with learners who have sensory difficulties), or work at either end of the 0 to 25 age range that we potentially work with.

One of the things I often say very early on in my DA training sessions is that I don’t evangelise about DA. That is, I don’t promote the view that DA is the only way of assessing a learner. I was a Test Verifier for many years, which brought me into close contact with the BPS test competencies. Some of these competencies relate to assessment decisions; that is, that the approaches used have to be fit for purpose. Psychometrics are not the answer to everything…..but neither is DA. However, I rarely feel the need to use static ability tests and overall when I use DA I find that I have much more to say about how the pupil learns and what needs to happen to support and improve some of these processes. Interactive assessment means that there are much clearer links between assessment and intervention, so going back to the language element discussed earlier, the outcomes of DA give me language to talk about how to intervene. Whenever I come across reports that are based around static tests of cognitive ability I often struggle to track the recommendations back to the results of the static ability test and the original purpose of the assessment (where it’s stated; many reports don’t seem to include this!). Again, the test competencies are very clear about these links. For me, DA is the most helpful way of doing this when it comes to assessing cognition.

The quote below from Carol Lidz sums up very succinctly what assessment should be all about and is a key message to take way from this blog:

“If we wish to determine how far the child’s knowledge base deviates from the norm, we will continue to administer a psychometric measure. If we wish to determine the content of a child’s specific knowledge base within a specific domain, we will administer a curriculum based or criterion referenced test. If we wish to derive hypotheses about how the child learns, how responsive the child is to attempts to intervene, and what seems to be interfering with the child’s ability to profit from existing attempts at instruction, we will use dynamic assessment.”

Find out more about the upcoming Dynamic Assessment CPD event for Educational Psychologists in September 2020:

Read Dr Jenny Dutton’s Dynamic Assessment blog here.