Dynamic Assessment
Same score, different futures.
Dynamic assessment builds mediation into the assessment itself, treating how a learner responds to graduated help as evidence of abilities that are still emerging.
Two learners both write Yesterday I go to the market. One fixes it when asked, “Anything wrong with the verb?”; the other needs the teacher to point at go and explain that the action is past. A conventional test gives them the same score, while dynamic assessment (DA) treats the difference as the most important information.
DA joins assessment and teaching: the assessor offers help, or mediation, and records how learners respond. Its roots lie in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development: what a learner can do with help today indicates what they may soon do alone. Vygotsky did not develop DA himself. His colleague Alexander Luria introduced the idea to Western readers in 1961, and Reuven Feuerstein’s work on mediated learning became one of its most influential strands.
James Lantolf and Matthew Poehner mapped out DA for second language research and distinguished two approaches. In interventionist DA, mediation is standardised in advance, often as a fixed sequence of hints from implicit to explicit, so results can be scored. In interactionist DA, mediation emerges in dialogue and is tuned to each learner’s responses, drawing on Aljaafreh and Lantolf’s (1994) scale of increasingly explicit help in writing tutorials. Computerised versions script graded prompts in advance and report an actual score, a mediated score and a learning potential score (Poehner & Lantolf, 2013).
The trade-off is real: interactionist DA yields rich diagnosis but is slow and hard to standardise, while interventionist formats scale up but lose some sensitivity to the individual. Either way, DA counts responsiveness to help as part of what is assessed, not as contamination of the score. That makes it a close cousin of formative assessment.
In actionA ladder of prompts
- T
- Read your sentence again. Anything you’d change?
- S
- Yesterday I go to the market. Hmm, no?
- T
- Look at the verb.
- S
- Go... Oh, yesterday. Went!
- T
- Yes. So that took two prompts this time.
An invented exchange. Each prompt is a little more explicit than the last; the number needed is the diagnostic information, and fewer prompts over time suggests development.
In the classroom
- 1
Write a four-step prompt ladder for one recurring error, from “Check this sentence” to an explicit explanation, and use it consistently for a week.
- 2
Record the level of help each learner needed, not just whether they got it right, and plan follow-up around that level.
- 3
Add a transfer item, a harder or different task using the same feature, to see whether the mediated learning carries over, much as scaffolding should eventually fade.
Myth and reality
Helping learners during an assessment spoils the results.
In DA the help is part of the procedure: how much mediation a learner needs, and of what kind, is recorded and interpreted as evidence of emerging ability.
Reflect
If two of your students got the same mark but one needed far more help to get there, would your next lesson for them be the same?
Worth a minute before your next lesson, or a conversation in the staffroom.
SourcesChecked against Crossref and library records
Grounded in Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development; Luria introduced the idea to Western readers in 1961, and Feuerstein developed it further. Lantolf and Poehner’s 2004 paper set out DA for second language assessment and distinguished interventionist from interactionist approaches.
Lantolf, J. P., & Poehner, M. E. (2004). Dynamic assessment of L2 development: Bringing the past into the future. Journal of Applied Linguistics, 1(1), 49–72.
Poehner, M. E. (2008). Dynamic assessment: A Vygotskian approach to understanding and promoting L2 development. Springer.
The book-length account of DA in L2 learning, with theory, worked examples and guidance for classrooms.
Poehner, M. E., & Lantolf, J. P. (2005). Dynamic assessment in the language classroom. Language Teaching Research, 9(3), 233–265.
Introduces Feuerstein’s work and compares DA with formative assessment, a good bridge for classroom teachers.
Aljaafreh, A., & Lantolf, J. P. (1994). Negative feedback as regulation and second language learning in the zone of proximal development. The Modern Language Journal, 78(4), 465–483.
The influential study of tutorial feedback graded from implicit to explicit, which shaped how L2 researchers think about mediation.
Poehner, M. E., & Lantolf, J. P. (2013). Bringing the ZPD into the equation: Capturing L2 development during Computerized Dynamic Assessment (C-DA). Language Teaching Research, 17(3), 323–342.
Shows how DA principles can be built into online reading and listening tests that report mediated and learning potential scores.
ConnectionsSee it in the graph
- Zone of Proximal Developmentnot yet writtenDA operationalises the gap between independent and assisted performance.
- Formative AssessmentBoth use assessment to promote learning; DA builds mediation into the assessment.
- ScaffoldingGraduated, contingent help that is meant to fade as competence grows.
- The Validity Argumentnot yet writtenMediated scores raise new questions about what interpretations are justified.
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