Learning and assessment

What are the advantages and disadvantages of psychometric and dynamic

assessments of children’s learning?

When an educational psychologist wants to find out how a child learns, what
form of assessment should be used? What assumptions does this assessment
approach make?

What is more important – what we learn or how we learn?

Aims and objectives:

 To develop an awareness of educational psychology practice in relation to
the assessment of learning abilities
 To contrast psychometric (standardized) assessment with dynamic
assessment
 To highlight the purpose of assessing learning processes rather than the
products of learning
 Understand purposes of assessment
 Understand strengths and drawbacks of standardized
assessment/psychometrics and dynamic assessment
Why should you be interested in assessment?
 You have been and are subject to it, and may be using them in your own
research
 When you apply for jobs you are being assessed and might have to
compete psychometric assessments
 Is what we know more important than how we know it?
 How does it relate to learning and the work of educational psychologists?
Assessment in professional EP practice – the use of tests
 Represents a philosophical and political dilemma
 Teaching content (what) or teaching process (how)
 Psychometric, standardised tests of ability/intelligence or interactive
dynamic tests
 Stability or change
Two contrasting forms of testing in a nutshell
 Psychometric: a series of items or tasks administered in a standard way;
the results provide a measure of how child x compares to other children
in the population sample (past learning)
 Dynamic: A series of items or tasks administered through the educational
psychologist interacting with the child and task, and integrating
“teaching” into assessment to assess what helps a child learn more
effectively (potential learning)
Purposes of assessment (Burden, 1996)
 What are you trying to measure and why?
 Assessment for classification or categorization
 Assessment for diagnosis (e.g. learning disabilities)
 Assessment through intervention (might work with teachers to develop
intervention for a child)
  To evaluate
 To empower – to help child see his/her own progress
Foundational assumptions of psychometric testing
 Psychometric/standardized testing assumes abilities are relatively stable
attributes that develop as an interaction between hereditary and
environment (Sternberg & Grigorenko, 2002)
 Stability is emphasized over change
 Originally developed by Binet
 The purpose of psychometric/standardized testing is to
categorize/classify by measuring past learning and statistical comparison
– norm-referenced, usually distributed scores
 So, what has been learnt, not how
Foundational assumptions of dynamic assessment
 Human intellective functioning is characterized by adaptation and change
rather than stability
 Structural cognitive modifiability – sees how an individual learns (can
become or change) as being more helpful than assessing what an
individual has learnt (stability)
Assumptions based on change or stability

Assumptions based on change Assumptions based on stability

Learning is embedded in a context and
culture
During assessment, a child works
interactively with a trained assessor
Focus on developing learning abilities:
process of cognitive functioning,
problem solving, metacognition,
feelings, motivation
Assessment models a child’s process of
learning and problem solving through
mediation on the part of the assessor
Scores acquire meaning through
quantitative analysis of pre- and post-
mediation performance, and
qualitative analysis of processing
strategies, and affective and
motivational factors. Results lead to
dynamic characterisation of the child
as an adaptive learner with the
potential for growth
Learning is an isolated, individual act
A child works unaided on a test
Identification of rank relative to a
referent group, classification,
prediction: little or no theorising about
underlying processes, focus on
available knowledge
The assessor is relatively passive,
following the standard instructions,
focus on identifying the patterns
among measured responses
Scores acquire meaning through
comparison with norms – results lead
to static characterisation of a child

Produces information that can lead to Produces information that can be used
intervention at school and at home and to make decisions about classification,
empower the child eligibility, and placement (Jensen,
2000, 2003)
What are psychometrics?
 Originally developed by Binet (1905)
 Suitability for schooling
 A way of comparing a child’s “mental age” with peers
 Intelligence quotient: mental age/chronological age x 100
 The study of individual differences: measurement of intelligence, abilities,
attainments, personality, motivation, and learning style
 Quick to use and interpret
 Claims to be the single best predictor of academic success – but academic
success is similarly measured??
 Requires a distribution of scores (Kline, 2000)
Problems with psychometric tests (Elliott, 2000, 2003)
 Intelligence is framed as the ability to learn but past learning is measured,
rather than the capacity/potential to learn
 Overemphasis on product, not process
 Provide little data to assess learning difficulties and suggest how to
intervene
 May be biased against culturally and linguistically diverse populations
What are dynamic assessments?
 Originally developed by Vygotsky (1896-1934)
 Considered learning a social act
 Argued that intellectual functioning is characterized by adaptation and
flexibility rather than stability
 Mediation and mediators
 Zone of proximal development – involves working out the rate of learning
where the child can develop new skills
Dynamic assessment in practice
 Educational psychologist interacts with the child and a task and
integrates instruction into the assessment
 Believe three elements of change:
o In skill (change in academic skill or cognitive functioning)
o In rate of learning (rate of acquisition of skill or function)
o Amount, degree and nature of mediation required to bring about
change
Dynamic assessment demystifies learning: learning is a combination of:
 The necessary cognitive functions or skills for a particular task or
problem (thinking)
 Metacognitive skills (thinking about thinking)
 Feelings and motivation (performing)
Advantages of dynamic assessment:
 Research suggests superior predictive validity than standardized
assessment because it focuses on what the child can achieve
 Provides stronger evidence of learning potential (e.g. Grigorenko, 2009)
Disadvantages of dynamic assessment
 Can take more time than standardized tools
 Decision-making is subjective because there are few if any standardized
instructions
 Doubts about the generalizability across domains (maths, reading)
  Difficulties over reliability and validity
 Few examples of systematic implementation (Tzuriel, 2001)
Take-home messages
 Asking questions about why the child isn’t learning well – questions about
how are more important than what
