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Learning potential and cognitive modifiability

Alex Kozulin

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Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice, 18:2, 169-181, DOI:
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Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice
Vol. 18, No. 2, May 2011, 169–181

Learning potential and cognitive modifiability

Alex Kozulin*

International Center for the Enhancement of Learning Potential, Jerusalem, Israel

Assessment
10.1080/0969594X.2010.526586
CAIE_A_526586.sgm
0969-594X
Taylor
2011
20Article
18
kozulin@post.tau.ac.il
AlexKozulin
00000May
&
andFrancis
Francis
(print)/1465-329X
in
2011
Education (online)

The relationship between thinking and learning constitutes one of the fundamental
problems of cognitive psychology. Though there is an obvious overlap between
the domains of thinking and learning, it seems more productive to consider
learning as being predominantly acquisition while considering thinking as the
application of the existent concepts and strategies to new tasks. This distinction
acquires a new meaning in the context of the dynamic assessment (DA) approach,
which has often used the notions of learning potential and cognitive modifiability
interchangeably. An illustrative assessment study of 88 primary school students
shows that not all students who demonstrate high learning potential reveal a
propensity toward cognitive modifiability and vice versa. Educational
implications for the design, selection and application of DA procedures are
discussed.
Keywords: cognition; learning; dynamic assessment; Raven Coloured Matrices

The relationship between thinking and learning constitutes one of the fundamental
problems of cognitive psychology. The analysis of this relationship has been compli-
cated, however, both by a multitude of overlapping concepts such as ‘intelligence’,
‘cognition’, ‘experience’, and ‘problem solving’, and by the tendency of researchers
to use many of these terms interchangeably. For example, Slavin (1994, 134) defines
intelligence as a ‘general aptitude for learning’, while Beckmann (2006) vacillates
between defining learning as one of the important aspects of intelligence and defin-
ing intelligence as the ability to learn. At the same time Sternberg (2010) in his
Encyclopaedia Britannica entry suggests that: ‘In psychology, the term [intelligence]
may more specifically denote the ability to apply knowledge to manipulate one’s
environment or to think abstractly as measured by objective criteria’. In the same
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Berlyn (2010) asserts that:

…psychologists have not settled on any single definition or characterisation of thinking.

For some it is a matter of modifying “cognitive structures” (i.e., perceptual representa-
tions of the world or parts of the world), while others regard it as internal problem-solv-
ing behaviour.

The problem becomes even more complicated because in practice we derive our
judgments about thinking, learning or intellective processes from data obtained with
the help of usually rather restrictive assessment techniques. For example, a child’s
performance with WISC-R tasks (Wechsler 1974) is interpreted as a measure of his or
her intelligence because WISC-R is defined as an intelligence test. At the same time

*Email: kozulin@post.tau.ac.il

ISSN 0969-594X print/ISSN 1465-329X online

© 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/0969594X.2010.526586
http://www.informaworld.com
170 A. Kozulin

such a sub-test of WISC-R as Block Design is clearly a problem-solving task and as

such can be considered a measure of a child’s thinking skills. The same data can thus
be treated in one instance as indicative of the child’s intelligence and in another as
reflecting his or her thinking processes. If one subscribes to the idea that intelligence
is the ability to learn, then the same Block Design score can also be interpreted as a
measure of the child’s learning ability. Faced with such endless conceptual and meth-
odological overlaps one may wish to differentiate between thinking and learning
components of intelligence. Actually, even in our everyday language we tend to distin-
guish between these two notions. One may say about a certain person: ‘She is a quick
learner, but not a great thinker’, or ‘He is such a deep thinker, but a poor learner’. Grig-
orenko and Sternberg (1998, 92) seemed to express a similar point of view when they
observed that, ‘it is quite common to find children who show good cognitive test
results but have a slow rate of learning and vice versa’. The relationships between
different components of intelligence will then appear as shown in Figure 1.
The standard practice of using both intelligence and achievement tests as a
Figure 1. Thinking, learning and knowledge components of intelligence.

measure of students’ learning ability is problematic because in these tests learning

appears only through its distant objectified results (see Haywood and Lidz 2007). For
example, the logic of such testing dictates that if the vocabulary score of a student is
high then this indicates that this student was more efficient in learning new words.
One should notice, however, that such a conclusion is based on substituting the final,
objectified result of learning for learning itself: the process of learning appears here
only through the number of words that the student was able to retrieve during the test.
The learning process itself is not tackled during the assessment. We do not know
which strategies were used by the student for learning new words. We also do not

Figure 1. Thinking, learning and knowledge components of intelligence.

 Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 171

know how much time he or she invested in their learning. As a result the final product
– vocabulary score – may then be erroneously interpreted as reflecting the student’s
learning ability.
The fact that thinking and learning processes are interconnected does not mean
that there is no advantage in differentiating between them. Moreover, I believe and
will attempt to show that such a distinction may have both a theoretical significance
and a direct bearing on our interpretation of various psychological tests and assess-
ment procedures. This distinction seems to be particularly important when we leave
the traditional psychometric approach with its reliance on static tests and advance
toward the emerging paradigm of the so-called dynamic assessment (DA) (Feuerstein,
Rand, and Hoffman 1979; Lidz 1987; Sternberg and Grigorenko 2002; Haywood and
Lidz 2007). In DA, students’ learning experience becomes an integral part of the
assessment procedure. One may then ask whether the introduction of the learning
phase shifts the goal of assessment to the identification of learning processes, or
whether these processes serve as a means for better assessment of students’ thinking.
In other words, the question is whether the DA aims at discovering the modifiability
of students’ thinking or their learning potential.

Acquisition vs. application

Before turning to DA proper, a hypothesis should be advanced regarding those
distinctive features that allow us to differentiate between the acts of learning and the
acts of thinking. Such a differentiation can be achieved if we look at these two
processes though the prism of acquisition vs. application. Learning then will appear
as being predominantly dependent on acquisition processes, while thinking predomi-
nantly on application. In both the educational practice and the learning phase of the
DA, major emphasis is usually placed on the learner’s ability to use examples, models
and cues for the acquisition of rules, concepts, and skills. (For the methodology of
using models and cues in DA see Sternberg and Grigorenko 2002.) For example,
quick learners need fewer examples and are more skilful in using models and cues
than slow learners. This phenomenon is well known in educational practice and teach-
ers are usually quite good at detecting quick learners in their classrooms. On the other
hand thinking, often operationalised as problem solving, depends mostly on the ability
to select, integrate and apply to a given problem the existent knowledge and skills.
Our everyday notion of a ‘good thinker’ often refers exactly to this integrative ability.
A good thinker may have the same basic skills as other people but he or she will be
more efficient in selecting and deploying those skills most relevant for solving a given
task. One may find a somewhat similar distinction in Sternberg’s (1985) theory of
intelligence where knowledge acquisition components correspond to what here is
called acquisition, while meta-components correspond to application.
There are some additional aspects that may help us to distinguish between acqui-
sition and application processes. In the acquisition process the task itself is usually
clearly defined from the beginning, while in the problem solving situation the task
may require both formulating the problem and selecting a strategy relevant for its
resolution. Better thinkers are those who demonstrate greater independence in finding
out what constitutes the problem, which strategy is appropriate, and which parameters
of the task should be taken into account.
Let us now examine how a task usually appears in the contexts associated with
either learning or problem solving. In the problem-solving tasks, like those used in
172 A. Kozulin

standard psychometric tests, an example is usually given, but it is neither analysed nor
explained. Models are absent and cues, when existent, must usually be discovered by
the problem solvers themselves. The following item is quite typical of a standard
psychometric school ability test (e.g. Otis and Lennon 1996):

‘What number when doubled is equal to a quarter of forty?’

Answers: a) 21/4; b) 10; c) 20; d) 5; e) 45

Though the mathematical content of the task is quite basic, a student needs a consid-
erable integrative ability to solve it. First of all, linguistic skills should be deployed so
that the text is decoded and translated into the numerical modality. Then the problem
itself should be identified as that of equivalence between a certain (unknown) number
multiplied by two and a quarter of 40. The student is then expected to find a relevant
strategy for finding this number. One of the strategies would be to start by finding out
how much is a quarter of 40 (40:4 = 10 or 1/4 x 40 = 10) and then going systematically
over all the given answers, multiplying each one of them by 2 while checking which
of the results equals 10. A good problem solver may actually substitute the operation
of multiplication (x 2) with that of division (10:2 = 5) and in this way arrive at the
correct answer in a more efficient way. A poor problem solver may start by multiply-
ing by two all given answers one by one and writing down the intermediate results,
then finding out how much is a quarter of forty, and then comparing the intermediate
results with 10. At the end of the problem-solving process students are expected to
check their answers.
Let us now check how the same type of task appears in the acquisition context, e.g.
a mathematics textbook. Students are usually given a general model or a series of
examples and a direct explanatory text. For example, the introduction of the notion of
ratios often appears in the following way:

A ratio is a quotient of one number (or variable) A to another number (or variable) B. It
can be expressed in three ways: 1) A:B, 2) A/B; 3) A÷B. The ratio A:B is read as A to B.

Example 1.
Write down the ratio of 2 hours: 30 minutes in simplest form. Answer - 2 hours: 30 min
= 120 min: 30 min = 4:1.

Example 2.
A rectangle has the length of 2 meters and the width of 1 meter 20 cm. Find the ratio of
length to width. Answer – Length: Width = 200 cm : 120 cm = 5:3.

What is required of a student is to grasp the connection between an abstractive model

(e.g. A:B) and a more elaborate example (e.g. Length:Width = 200 cm:120 cm = 5:3).
A good learner is expected to be able to map the same basic model onto a variety of
concrete examples, e.g. ratio of 2 kg:100 gr = 2000 gr:100gr = 20:1.
Even these rather elementary examples clearly demonstrate that learning and
problem-solving tasks focus on different aspects of cognitive activity and thus
require different approaches for their assessment. In the problem-solving situation
the focus is on the ability to formulate the problem using the given data and to apply
the pre-existent strategies and skills. In the learning task the emphasis is on effi-
ciency, of using the given models and examples and in applying them to new, but
similar material.
 Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 173

This point was strongly emphasised by Brown and Ferrara (1985) in their study
of learning and problem solving of primary school children. The children were
offered a series completion learning task, e.g. N G O H P I Q J _ _ _ _ (answer: R K
S L). Standardised prompts were provided by the tester, starting with general hints
regarding the need to look for patterns, which then became more explicit in directing
the child’s attention to the important parameters of the task. The final hints effec-
tively provided the child with the solution of the problem. Brown and Ferrara opera-
tionalised the speed of learning as the number of standardised prompts needed for
reaching the criterion. They then classified the students as ‘slow’ or ‘fast’ learners on
the basis of the median number of prompts required. The authors also obtained
students’ IQ scores and on the basis of them classified the students into ‘average IQ’
(mean 101) and ‘high IQ’ (mean 122) categories. If problem-solving ability as
reflected in the IQ scores were indistinguishable from the learning ability, then all
‘high IQ’ students would have been ‘fast learners’, and all ‘average IQ’ students
‘slow learners’. The results, however, demonstrated that ‘a good third of the children
had learning speed not predictable from their IQ scores’ (Brown and Ferrara 1985,
288). In other words, though the majority of ‘high IQ’ students indeed turned out to
be fast learners, some demonstrated slow learning. On the other hand, some of the
fast learners turned out to have a lower IQ.

Learning potential or cognitive modifiability

The above discrepancy between learning and thinking returns us to the question posed
more than 70 years ago by the Swiss psychologist Andre Rey (1934) and the Russian
psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1934/1986): To what extent does the assessment of prob-
lem solving inform us about the learning potential of the child? By introducing the
notion of ‘educability’, Rey directed the attention of his readers to the fact that what
is expected of psycho-educational assessment is, primarily, to determine the ability of
the child to benefit from learning experience. Somewhat paradoxically, standard
psychometric and achievement tests systematically excluded the learning aspect from
the test procedures. As a result the learning ability could probably be inferred from the
assessment results but could not be directly evaluated. To illustrate his theoretical
position Rey demonstrated how a repeated presentation of similar tasks (finding a
fixed peg among nine pegs on the square plate) with a simple feedback given to chil-
dren generates learning profiles that are more informative than the child’s static score
on the same task. For example, the analysis of the sequence of children’s trials allows
us to identify the impact of learning on the change in problem-solving strategy – from
chaotic trial-and-error to systematic exploration. In this way Rey introduced two
important aspects of DA: emphasis on the problem-solving process rather than prod-
uct, and inclusion of the learning phase into the assessment procedure. While in the
Rey study the child was just given simple feedback, later DA studies used a more
active form of learning. Within this perspective the central question is to what extent
the child benefits from the learning intervention in the form of elaboration of the
model task or providing a sequence of prompts. Ideally the child’s performance during
such DA would be indicative of his or her learning abilities and needs.
Vygotsky’s (1934/1986) contribution was broader in scope and probably more far
reaching in its implications. Vygotsky not only pointed to limitations of standard
psychometric procedures but suggested an alternative conceptualisation of human
mental development. For Vygotsky human mental functions have a socio-cultural
174 A. Kozulin

nature and their development depends on the involvement of children in joint activity
with adults and the appropriation of symbolic tools available in a given society. In such
a theoretical context the assessment of emerging mental functions requires the situation
of joint activity of children and adults. The difference between children’s already
established mental functions and the emergent ones is conceptualised through the
notion of the Zone of Proximal Development – ZPD (see Chaiklin 2003). Vygotsky
thus introduced the following aspects that play an important role in the DA approach:
(1) active interaction between adults and children during the assessment; (2) emphasis
on emerging rather than already established mental functions; and (3) comparison
between individual and aided performance as a measure of the child’s ZPD.
The use of ZPD as a theoretical basis for DA, however, was complicated by the
fact that ZPD had been described by Vygotsky (1934/1986; 1935/1996) in three
different albeit interrelated contexts. The first context is developmental and focuses on
the question of how to investigate the emergent mental functions which are not fully
developed and as such cannot be observed in the child’s independent activity. The
second context is related to assessment and points to the fact that children who have
the same standard intelligence scores may demonstrate different ZPDs explored under
conditions of joint activity with adults. The third context is educational and focuses
on the interaction between adults’ ‘academic’ concepts and children’s spontaneous
concepts. Vygotsky believed that for education to be effective the learning process
should take place in the children’s ZPD; learning and instruction should be used as a
‘motor’ of the child’s mental development. Additional complication was created by
the fact that Vygotsky made several general suggestions on how to explore ZPD but
left no specific assessment technique. All these difficulties notwithstanding, the
concept of ZPD seems to offer a perspective that may help to identify mental devel-
opment and cognitive modifiability as a target of DA.
In Vygotsky’s (1935/1996) description of ZPD research, children’s joint activity
with adults usually assumes the form of presenting a model or worked-out example
and providing cues, or starting the problem-solving process and then asking children
to continue. All these activities more or less correspond to the learning phase of DA
as it is currently practised (see Haywood and Lidz 2007). Vygotsky’s goal, however,
was not to determine the child’s facility with these learning prompts, but to use them
as a means of viewing the child’s emergent mental functions. Functions emergent at
one developmental age under favourable conditions are actualised during the next
age (see Chaiklin 2003). In other words, evaluation of the child’s ZPD allows one to
imagine his or her thinking as it will appear two to three years later. In this sense
ZPD is related to the task of exploring children’s mental development or cognitive
modifiability, rather than immediate learning potential. The latter point in no way
detracts from the value of the concept of ZPD for the theory of ‘learning activity’
developed by Vygotsky’s followers in Russia (see Zuckerman 2003). The fact that
specially designed learning activities promote students’ mental development does not
mean that there is no need to distinguish between learning and thinking components
of intelligence.
Already in these early attempts of Rey and Vygotsky one can discern two perspec-
tives: one aimed at creating procedures that would allow the evaluation of children’s
learning potential, and the other attempting to establish a new approach to the assess-
ment of thinking, an approach that instead of testing the existent problem-solving
skills, aims to determine the degree of modifiability of thinking. The learning potential
assessment sets as its goal the evaluation of children’s ability to benefit from models,
 Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 175

cues, and examples during the performance of the learning tasks. In the above-
mentioned Brown and Ferrara (1985) study, learning potential was defined by a mini-
mal number of cues that students needed to solve the tasks. Learning potential estab-
lished in this way may help to predict students’ performance in future learning
situations. For example, the efficiency of learning the rules of an artificial language
through a series of samples may serve as an indicator of the students’ potential for
learning foreign languages (Sternberg and Grigorenko 2002).
On the other hand, DA of thinking focuses on the modifiability of a wide range of
cognitive functions of students and/or their readiness for the transition from one cogni-
tive-developmental stage to the next one. Thus Feuerstein, Rand, and Hoffman (1979)
explicitly set up as one of the major goals of their DA: ‘the extent of examinee’s modi-
fiability in terms of levels of functioning made accessible to him by the process of
modification, and the significance of the levels attained by him in the hierarchy of
cognitive functions’ (91). The latter point refers to the question of whether the
observed change enables the student to acquire abstract thinking and logical operations
in a variety of domains. For example, in their study of analogical reasoning Feuerstein,
Rand, and Hoffman (1979, 384–99) inquired to what extent a systematic mediation of
comparison, differentiation, and classification of verbal and figural material helps
students to ascend to the level of analogical reasoning in various modalities.
Karpov and Gindis (2000) also seem to view the transition to a higher cross-
domain cognitive level as a criterion of cognitive modifiability. In their research such
a criterion was operationalised as children’s transition from visual motor to visual
imaging to the symbolic level of problem solving. In this way Karpov and Gindis
emphasised the cross-domain nature of cognitive modifiability and its interpretation
as a readiness for transition to a higher cognitive-developmental level.
It thus seems appropriate to identify the restructuring of a wide range of cognitive
functions as a sign of cognitive modifiability, and the efficiency of using such learning
devices as models, prompts, and cues for the solution of a more restricted range of
tasks, as indicative of students’ learning potential.
In spite of the above-mentioned tendencies for a differential approach to the task
of learning potential assessment and the task of assessing modifiability of thinking,
the majority of DA research deliberately or unwittingly obliterated this distinction.
For example Budoff (1987) started his argument in favour of DA by showing that IQ
tests cannot serve as a reliable tool for the identification of mentally retarded children
and the evaluation of their intellectual abilities. He then proceeded to demonstrate
that the inclusion of the learning phase in the assessment procedure, employing such
standard intelligence tests as Kohs cubes and Raven Matrices, helps to distinguish
between ‘gainers’ who benefited from learning-within-the-test opportunity and ‘non-
gainers’ who did not. By any standard Budoff’s procedure should be defined as aimed
at discovering the students’ learning potential. Nevertheless, Budoff interpreted his
results as bearing on the impaired or non-impaired intelligence of his subjects rather
than on their potential for learning. It is possible that such confusion originated in
Budoff’s very general definition of intelligence as ‘the ability to benefit from experi-
ence’ (1987, 55).
More recently Beckmann (2006, 36) claimed that dynamic testing, ‘primarily
focuses on psychometric attempts to obtain diagnostic information about a person’s
learning potential, learning ability, intellectual change potential, reserve capacity, and
so on’. Here all possible targets of DA are included without any discrimination. Little
wonder that DA researchers and practitioners still lament the lack of clarity in DA’s
176 A. Kozulin

objectives and methods (Karpov and Tzuriel 2009; Hessels-Schlatter and Hessels
2009).
Haywood and Lidz (2007) claimed that DA data may respond to a variety of ques-
tions. Some of them, according to the present point of view, are related to learning
while some are related to thinking. Thus, when discussing the question ‘What is the
response to intervention?’, Haywood and Lidz seem to focus on students’ learning
potential. On the other hand their discussion of ‘How much investment, of what kinds,
may be required to promote long-term gains in performance?’ seems to be related to
the question of cognitive modifiability (2007, 14).
The present author (Kozulin, Kaufman, and Lurie 1997) also did not escape the
same confusion. In a study of new immigrant students he made practically no distinc-
tion between their learning potential as revealed through performance with learning
tasks and the students’ cognitive modifiability as inferred from the cognitive change
observed after implementation of a year-long cognitive enrichment programme.
In other words, though a theoretical basis has existed for distinguishing between
DA of learning potential and DA of cognitive modifiability, DA practitioners have
systematically conflated these two goals and as a result obscured the objectives and
methods of DA.

How can one distinguish between learning and thinking processes?

As in any other empirical field the conceptual distinction between learning potential
and cognitive modifiability cannot be fully clarified without proper methodological
analysis of DA procedures. In other words, depending on the kind of interaction that
takes place during the DA, the procedure may provide evidence of either students’
learning potential or their cognitive modifiability. Because different authors use
different procedures but all define them as DA, the search should be for a procedure
that can clearly distinguish between learning and thinking aspects. One of the best
candidates for such a procedure seems to be Feuerstein, Rand, and Hoffman’s (1979)
Set Variations of Matrices. This DA procedure is based on items B8–B12 of the Raven
Coloured Matrices (Raven 1956). The students are presented with a training page that
includes a matrix of four graphic designs (one of which is missing) and six possible
answer designs. The relationships between task designs are based on the principles of
analogical reasoning. The learning phase includes detailed analysis of the training
page designs, their relationships, and relevant and irrelevant parameters, as well as the
analysis of the answer designs and reasons why only one of them constitutes the right
answer. The learning phase also includes formulation of more general principles of
analogical reasoning. After the learning phase based on the first training page is over
the students are presented with six similar tasks that they are required to solve inde-
pendently. After that the second training page is given and the procedure is repeated.
Altogether the Set Variations include five training pages and 30 tasks for independent
solution.
Set Variations therefore represent a clear case of learning potential assessment.
The learning is based on models, cues and explanations provided by the assessor and
applied immediately to similar task material. As such, Set Variations should be able
to quite clearly distinguish efficient learners from less efficient learners.
On the other hand, Feuerstein, Rand, and Hoffman’s (1979) group DA procedure
may be considered as aimed at evaluating students’ cognitive modifiability. Students
are first asked to solve Raven Coloured Matrices in a standard way without any
 Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 177

mediation. Then mediation of Set Variations is performed and students are tested a
week later, again using Raven Coloured Matrices. The pre- to post-test change in
Raven scores is considered to reflect students’ cognitive modifiability. Because only
5 out of 36 of the Raven Coloured Matrices tasks serve as prototypes of the Set Vari-
ations, the students’ success in Raven Coloured Matrices as a whole cannot be attrib-
uted to learning these tasks. To succeed in solving Raven Coloured Matrices as a
whole the students should be able to generalise from the skills acquired during the
learning phase and transfer them to the tasks of a different nature. These are the defin-
ing features of cognitive modifiability. It should be admitted though that the graphic
modality of presentation remains the same, thus narrowing the modifiability scope.
If learning potential and cognitive modifiability are the same phenomenon then
students more successful in Set Variations should also be more successful in the
Raven Coloured Matrices post-test. On the other hand, if these two phenomena are
different we should find a considerable number of ‘mixed cases’ – students with good
learning potential but relatively low modifiability and vice versa. The following
experimental study was aimed at illustrating a possible empirical way to answer this
question.

Subjects and procedures

The following data were collected in the course of DA of 88 immigrant students from
Ethiopia (age 10–11) studying in Israeli primary schools. The majority of students had
immigrated four to five years prior to the study, so all their formal schooling had taken
place in Israel. Like all immigrant students they received supplementary Hebrew-as-
a-second-language lessons but no other cognitive enrichment programmes. The
students were recommended for DA by their schools because of their under-achieve-
ment in reading, writing and mathematics. The DA procedure included a Raven
Coloured Matrices static pre-test, a Set Variations dynamic assessment procedure, and
a week later a Raven Coloured Matrices static post-test. In addition, the students were
tested in reading comprehension and mathematics.

Results
The correlations between the Raven Coloured Matrices pre- and post-test scores and
the Set Variations scores are presented in Table 1.
On the basis of their performance all students were defined as belonging to one of
the following groups: High Learning/High Modifiability; High Learning/Low Modi-
fiability; Low Learning/High Modifiability; and Low Learning/Low Modifiability.
Students were assigned to High or Low groups on the basis of their performance
being above or below the median score in the Set Variations and the Raven Coloured
Matrices post-test. Thus, for example, a student who performed above the median

Table 1. Correlations between Raven Coloured Matrices pre- and post-test scores and the
Set Variations scores (N = 88).
Raven Pre Set Variations
Raven Pre – 0.49
Raven Post 0.54 0.54
178 A. Kozulin

Table 2. Number of students belonging to high or low learning and modifiability groups (N =
88).
High Learning Low Learning
High Modifiability 32 12
Low Modifiability 12 32

score in both Set Variations and Raven Coloured Matrices post-test is defined as
belonging to the High Learning/High Modifiability group, while a student who
performed above the median score in Raven Matrices post-test but below the median
score in Set Variations is defined as belonging to Low Learning/High Modifiability
(see Table 2).
The Chi Square test was performed, testing the hypothesis that no more than
10% of the students will belong to the mixed groups, e.g. ‘high learning with low
modifiability’ and ‘low learning with high modifiability’. The Chi Square = 22.12,
df = 3, p < 0.001. The hypothesis should be rejected. Actually, 27.3% of the
students belong to these mixed groups. Moreover, in some students their learning
ability seems to be highly independent of both their initial performance level and
their post-training performance. Six students (6.8% of the group) belonging to the
High Learning group showed Low performance results in both pre- and post- Raven
Coloured Matrices tests.
One may conclude that both the absence of a stronger correlation between the Set
Variations scores and the post-test scores and the presence of a considerable number
of students in the mixed groups indicate that learning potential and cognitive modifi-
ability represent two different aspects of the students’ intelligence. The results
reported above indicate that even in the case of tasks of the same type (i.e. matrices),
learning potential appears to be distinct from cognitive modifiability. A student may
be quite efficient in learning from worked-out examples mediated by the DA assessor
and yet not capable of generalising and applying the thus learned strategies to a differ-
ent type of task. These results allow us to further elaborate the topic of learning trans-
fer discussed by Brown and Ferrara (1985). In their study prompts were used as a tool
for learning how to solve both the ‘near-’ and ‘far-transfer’ cognitive tasks. The
authors concluded that some students, efficient in learning from prompts when ‘near’
tasks were presented, proved to be less efficient in using prompts with ‘far’ tasks. In
other words, Brown and Ferrara identified different levels of learning potential. In the
present study, learning from worked-out examples (Set Variations) was contrasted
with independent transfer to ‘far’ tasks (Raven Coloured Matrices post-test). In this
way the difference between learning potential and cognitive modifiability rather than
a degree of learning potential was identified.

Conclusion: Dynamic Assessment of… what?

The distinction between learning potential and cognitive modifiability may have seri-
ous implications for the practical use of DA procedures. Budoff (1987) and many
others after him (see Sternberg and Grigorenko 2002 for review) proposed DA as a
procedure that would allow better selection and placement of children with special
needs than the standard psychometric measures do. The key element in Budoff’s
approach is the use of DA for distinguishing between ‘gainers’ and ‘non-gainers’.
 Assessment in Education: Principles, Policy & Practice 179

Methodologically this distinction was based on the results of a typical learning

potential assessment procedure. If the distinction between learning and modifiability
potentials presented here is valid, then some of Budoff’s ‘gainers’ might have been
students with a relatively low propensity toward modifiability. In other words, in the
absence of a clear connection between the goals of DA and its methodology, there is
always a danger that a question about cognitive modifiability is answered with the
help of methodology attuned to the assessment of learning potential and vice versa.
It seems that historically the DA approach has been narrowly oriented toward
‘pure’ cognitive functions and engaged in competition with IQ tests instead of being
more finely tuned to educational needs. For example, if the purpose of DA is to iden-
tify students with higher learning potential who are more efficient in a typical acqui-
sition situation, then the learning potential tests should employ procedures reflecting
the acquisition of models, cues, and operations typical for classroom learning. Some
of the abstractive tasks, like matrices, or analogies typically used in DA, may be
replaced by curriculum-based tasks. An example DA of reading comprehension can
be seen in Kozulin and Garb (2004), and an example of DA of algebra in Fuchs,
Compton, Fuchs, Hollenbeck, Craddock, and Hamlett (2008). Though the need for
curriculum-based DA is recognised (see Haywood and Lidz 2007; Poehner 2008), its
development is still lagging significantly behind ‘cognitive’ DA. One of the promising
steps in this direction could be a closer alliance of DA with formative assessment (see
Kozulin 2009). What makes formative assessment similar to DA is its goal of turning
the assessment procedure into a tool of adjustment of the teaching/learning process to
students’ needs. A series of formative assessments with teaching in between them can
be envisioned as a form of curricular DA.
Cognitive modifiability in principle can also be evaluated using curricular mate-
rial. Such a possibility seems to be inherent in Vygotsky’s concept of ZPD. However,
as a first and methodologically simpler step the job of creating a comprehensive
cognitive modifiability assessment system should be completed. The initial DA model
proposed by Feuerstein (1967) suggested starting the DA procedure with a certain
initial task and then systematically changing it along the dimensions of complexity
and modality. For example, if keeping the same modality of presentation the task is
changed in terms of its complexity or the novelty of items. Alternatively, without
significantly changing the level of complexity the task will appear in different modal-
ities – verbal, graphic, numerical, etc. The operations involved should also be system-
atically manipulated, in such a way that the tasks presented in the same modality will
require application of a progressively larger repertoire of operations. Finally the oper-
ations may be kept constant but the task objects changed. Such a DA model will allow
for collecting of the following important data relevant to the students’ cognitive modi-
fiability:

The ability of the examinee to grasp the principle underlying the initial problem and to
solve it; the extent to which the newly acquired principle is successfully applied in solv-
ing problems that become progressively more different from the initial task; the differ-
ential preference of the examinee for various modalities of presentation… (Feuerstein,
Rand, and Hoffman 1979, 94)

The path from the model to actual methodology has not been easy. Even in
Feuerstein’s own DA system (LPAD) the above model has been realised only
partially – many of the LPAD tasks do not have sufficient systematic variability in
terms of complexity, modality and operations. The lack of uniformity in different
180 A. Kozulin

tasks also greatly complicates their use as elements of the total modifiability system
(for a critical analysis see Buchel and Scharnhorst 1993).
One may conclude that the design of learning potential assessment procedures, espe-
cially of a purely cognitive nature, proved to be much easier than the design of the cogni-
tive modifiability system, especially if the latter is expected to respond to the question
of students’ propensity toward progressive movement to a higher cognitive level.
However, the main problem seems to be not in methodological difficulties associated
with the design of such systems, but in the conceptual decision regarding the goals of
DA. Developers and practitioners should be more conscious of whether they pursue
the goal of learning potential assessment or that of evaluation of cognitive modifiability.
Their tools and procedures should clearly reflect one or the other of these orientations
and be sufficient for achieving the chosen objective. Learning potential assessment will
probably become much more aligned with curriculum-based formative assessment,
while assessment of cognitive modifiability with psycho-developmental assessment
will be reformed along more dynamic lines.

Acknowledgements
The assistance of Lea Yosef and Anat Cagan in the collection of data is gratefully acknowledged.

Notes on contributor
Alex Kozulin is research director of the International Center for the Enhancement of Learning
Potential in Jerusalem.

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