Dynamic Assessment as a Learning-Oriented Assessment Approach

Introduction

People come from different socio-cultural backgrounds, and their interactions with society may show differences, which directly affects each person’s opportunity to reach qualified education and information. Today students, especially those who are at the tertiary level, are getting mobilized around the world, so students whose socio-cultural and educational backgrounds are diverse might also influence classrooms’ dynamics (Shrestha, 2020). Even though the diversity inside the classrooms may be an advantage, it may also create some pitfalls. For example, in second/foreign language learning settings, adopting the same corrective feedback approach for all learners may not work effectively (Storch, 2018), and administering merely a past-to-present assessment model may not unpack each student’s ability to achieve something (Poehner & Lantolf, 2013). Moreover, countries’ different education policies during the pandemic and evolving digital technologies have ignited gaps among students (OECD, 2020; Shrestha, 2020).

These factors have led to a call for finding new instructional and assessment approaches and highlighted the salience of dialogic interaction, individual learners’ needs, and learning-based assessment approaches (Poehner & Inbar-Lourie, 2020). Grounding in this necessity, Dynamic Assessment (henceforth DA) has appeared as an alternative approach, and this chapter aims to report on DA, which is a learning-oriented assessment approach and relies on learners’ needs (Poehner, 2008). DA’s theoretical orientations are grounded in Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory (SCT) (Vygotsky, 1978) and Feuerstein’s Mediated Learning Experience (MLE) (Feuerstein et al., 2010), and DA moots that social milieu and social interaction have a salient impact on people’s cognition modification. That is, people’s innate abilities and people’s direct exposure to any stimuli may not be enough to unpack their exact potential to achieve something because social interaction leads people to think in new ways and modify their higher-order cognitive skills (Haywood & Tzuriel, 2002; Vygotsky, 1978). Within this nature, parents, teachers, and more-able peers have salient roles in children’s and students’ lives since they can support the learning process by mediating input (Feuerstein et al., 2010).

In a broad view, Dynamic Assessment refers to the fusion of instruction and assessment in a single collaborative work between teachers and students (Poehner, 2008). Its instructional dimension relies on SCT-oriented feedback approaches (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994). Although both language teachers and SLA (Second Language Acquisition) researchers have long been interested in how to deal with learners’ errors effectively and suggested a variety of feedback approaches to provide qualified input for the learners (Hyland & Hyland, 2006), the best one could not be decided yet because of learner differences, learners’ various needs, and different error natures (Mao & Lee, 2021; Nassaji, 2017; Storch, 2018). Regarding the need for increasing the effectiveness of feedback, negotiation on learner errors has recently been gaining importance (Erlam et al., 2013; Nassaji, 2017) since negotiation between two parties, such as teachers and students, paves the way to discuss, find a solution, and mitigate misunderstanding. This leads to a decrease in the gap between interlanguage and target language (Nassaji, 2016, 2017). Said another way, the salience of negotiation lies at the heart of dialogic reciprocal interaction and tailoring feedback according to each learner’s needs to provide qualified input through graduated feedback (Aljaafreh & Lantolf, 1994; Nassaji & Swain, 2000).