Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-222).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2008. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

This thesis aims to bring together the area of pragmatics in second language learning (SLL), and dynamic assessment (DA), and in doing so offer an alternative way of both assessing pragmatics and providing its instruction. DA aims to provide a detailed analysis of not only a learner’s current stage of development, but also their still developing abilities. Unifying instruction and assessment, the learner and a mediator co-construct a task, with the mediator providing assistance when necessary. By examining both the types of mediation practices and their frequency, insights can be gained as to the learner’s still maturing abilities, and future potential. DA also aims to uncover sources of learner difficulty, offering a diagnostic function as part of assessment. Drawing on conversation analysis research, the work of Gal’Perin and DA methodology, this study carried out a DA of the speech act of requesting in spoken interaction, assessing the effectiveness with which the DA promoted development in the learners. Further, the ability of the DA to uncover specific locations of learner difficulty was examined, as well as the ways in which the interlocutors successfully negotiated the opening and closing of mediation sequences. Six Japanese EFL learners in a university context co-constructed a number of role-play type language tasks with the researcher. In the first stage of the study, the researcher did not offer support to the learners, while in the following stage, mediation was provided when appropriate. The findings were used to inform the enrichment programme (EP) portion of the study, in which the learners met with the researcher for a period of four weeks, receiving tutoring. This was followed by further non-dynamic and dynamic assessments, to allow analysis of learner development. The study’s findings indicate that DA methodology, when applied to the speech act of requesting, can be an effective way to both promote learner development and assess learners’ abilities. Compared with the pre-EP assessments, participants produced more complex interactions that frequently showed evidence of taking the social context of the role-plays into account, as well as assuming greater responsibility for successfully completing the tasks. Participants were also more frequently able to verbally explain their language choices with reference to the target concepts of the assessments and EP. Further, overall, the opening and closing of mediation sequences were accomplished with more implicit negotiation practices, indicating increased interactive competence. The DA was also successful in locating specific locations of learner difficulty.

Children with complex communication needs (CCN) routinely have difficulty attaining appropriate literacy skills. Two indicators of literacy development are the alphabetic principle and phonemic awareness (Byrne & Fielding-Barnsley, 1989). The acquisition of minimal literacy skills such as letter sound knowledge can give children with CCN the opportunity to communicate and generate their own messages, instead of being reliant on vocabulary provided by others. In order to identify appropriate intervention approaches, nonverbal assessments of phonological and phonemic awareness for individuals with CCN are needed. The purpose of this study was to determine the reliability of the Dynamic Assessment of the Alphabetic Principle, as well as determine to what extent the performance of DAAP was associated with other measures of phonological and phonemic awareness and emergent reading skills. The DAAP was administered over the course of one to five session to seven participants with an assortment of developmental and language disorders. In addition to the DAAP, participants were administered a letter-sound knowledge task, a sound matching task that evaluated awareness of first sounds of words and separately evaluated awareness of the last sounds of words (i.e., either sound matching from the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing – 2nd edition [CTOPP-2; Wagner, Torgesen, Reshotte, & Pearson, 2013] or initial sound matching and final sound matching from the Phonological and Print Awareness Scale [PPA; Williams, 2014]). The reliability of the DAAP was calculated in two different ways. First, Cronbach alphas were calculated to estimate the reliability of items within subscales and between the subscales. Reliability of the items within each subscale ranged from .96 to .99 and the reliability of the items between each subscale ranged from .87 to .99. Overall the alpha between all four of the subscales was .96. Next, bivariate correlations were calculated between each subscale score. Values ranged from .82 to .99, and all were significant according to bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals that did not contain 0. This information indicated that there was a high degree of internal consistency for the items and the subtests for the DAAP. To evaluate the extent to which performance on the DAAP was associated with other measures of phonemic awareness, Bivariate Pearson correlations with standard significance values and bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals were calculated. The scores on the onset, rime, coda, and vowel subtests of the DAAP were correlated with sound matching first (SM-First), sound matching last (SM-Last) and sound matching chance (SM-chance) variables. The rime subtest of the DAAP was found to be significantly correlated with SM-First variable. Furthermore, the rime and vowel subscales of the DAAP were found to be significantly correlated with SM-Last variable. All four subtests of DAAP were significantly correlated to SM-chance variable. Lastly, to evaluate the performance on the DAAP in association to other measures of emergent reading skills, bivariate Pearson correlations were calculated between the subtests of the DAAP and letter sound knowledge (LSK). Scores on LSK was significantly related to rime, coda, and vowel. The data suggest that the DAAP is a reliable assessment. Furthermore, many conventional measures of phonological awareness and emergent reading skills were significantly correlated with subtests of DAAP. The pattern of the results suggests that the DAAP may be a reliable tool for measuring acquisition of the alphabetic principle in children with CCN.

Educational environments are unable to meet the needs of each individual child. It is believed that individual characteristics of children both limit and promote their learning experiences. Those characteristics that promote learning are essential tools that aid parents and teachers in their efforts to educate children. These characteristics need to be identified and nurtured during the learning process. It has long been suggested that curiosity is one such variable. This study wishes to determine the association between curiosity and learning potential within the dynamic assessment paradigm. A small quasi-experiment was conducted on 39 seven and eight year old children with the use of two assessment measures. The Cognitive Modifiability Battery, built on dynamic assessment theory, measures learning potential. An adapted version of the Multidimensional Curiosity Inventory, still in development, measures various types of curiosity. It was hypothesized that children with high levels of curiosity would measure high in learning potential and those with low levels of curiosity would measure low in learning potential. However, after dividing participants into four groups according to level of curiosity, a quadratic relationship was found between curiosity and learning potential. Copyright / Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Psychology / unrestricted

The social diversity of the South African population holds considerable challenge for psychologists, especially in respect of differences in language, culture and socio-economic context. The implications of the diverse nature of expectations and needs of unique individuals, clients as well as professionals, in particular in psychological assessment, are of concern. Projected storytelling in assessment is widely recognised as valuable, especially when working with children and adolescents. The technique has its pitfalls, including the way the stories produced may be influenced by leading questions, applying different methods of interpretation, and administering the instrument in cross-cultural assessment situations. Psychologists presenting projection plates to adolescent clients in South Africa frequently obtain little more than one-liners from standard procedures, raising doubts about viability and reliability of the technique. Prompting and probing need to be enhanced without compromising the projective value of responses or the uniqueness of clients. Feuerstein pioneered mediated intervention for learners with cognitive barriers, and the dynamic assessment of culturally different children. In this study, a dynamic assessment technique of questioning (DATQ) was used to actualise projection potential in mono- and cross-cultural assessment situations. The aim of the study was two-fold: to investigate the influence of a DATQ with projection plates during the psychological assessment of adolescents, and to investigate the influence of culture on such assessment in mono- and cross-cultural situations. A qualitative, multiple case study of ten participants representing five language groups in South Africa was undertaken within a predominantly postmodern epistemology. The tension between assessment from the positivist and post-modern paradigms was acknowledged through applying different perspectives during different stages of the research. A test-training-continuation-of-test situation was created for the administration of seven projection pictures, after which two discussion protocols were used. Data-analysis and interpretation took place in four phases by way of projection analysis (using the Bellak TAT Analysis Blank and Haworth’s analysis of defences), structural analysis (with categories such as word-count, response pattern, formulation, number of statements, prompts, hesitations, repetitions), analysis of the participant’s experience of the Murray-method versus the dynamic assessment technique of questioning, and analysis of possible cross-cultural influences on the assessment (utilizing the Scoring Sheet for the Psychocultural Scoring System (SSPSS) and triangulating the results with the projection analysis and the thematic analysis of the conversation about culture). Findings were derived from intra-comparison (per participant) and inter-comparison (per phase of the assessment) of the analyses. The main conclusions of the study point towards participants’ projective responses increasing and deepening in the direction of self-understanding and wholesome problem solution as well as being structurally enhanced, their emotional experience of the assessment situation being positive, culturally associated values being expressed and cultural barriers to interaction being lessened in both mono- and cross-cultural assessment. Whilst projection isn’t an exclusively context-bound phenomenon and generally occurs irrespective of cultural specificity, it was found that supporting clients through non-directive prompting to voice their associations apparently didn’t interfere with the unconscious content being solicited, irrespective of the mono-/cross-cultural nature of the assessment. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Educational Psychology / unrestricted

The purpose of this thesis was to examine the preliminary validity of a newly developed dynamic assessment of narrative language in Mandarin Chinese. Two studies are reported in this thesis. Study 1 included 31 second grade participants and Study 2 included 43 first grade participants. All participants were enrolled in a Chinese immersion program in an elementary school in Utah. A dynamic assessment of narrative language was administered to each participant in Mandarin Chinese. A teacher rating was also included in Study 1. Results indicated that the dynamic assessment investigated in this thesis demonstrated some similar characteristics with other valid dynamic assessments of narrative language. As hypothesized, participants in Study 1 made gains from pretest to posttest after the teaching phase. Gain score from pretest to posttest and static teacher rating did not significantly correlate with modifiability rating. Modifiability rating and posttest score were significantly correlated in both studies. There is also no significant group difference between the participants in Study 1 and Study 2 on modifiability rating. These results are promising. However, more research will need to be conducted to further examine the dynamic assessment due to the limitations of the current studies.

Purpose: This study examines the classification accuracy and interrater reliability of a dynamic assessment (DA) of inferential word learning designed to accurately identify kindergarten through sixth-grade students with and without language disorder. Method: The participants included 127 school-age children from a mountain west school district who were administered a DA of inferential word learning that entailed a pretest, a teaching phase, an examiner rating of the child's ability to infer word meaning (modifiability), and posttests. Results: Hierarchical logistic regression and receiver operator characteristic (ROC) analyses revealed that combining all posttests, the modifiability total, and the final examiner judgement scores from this DA yielded the strongest sensitivity (.83) and specificity (.80). The static measures and the dichotomized final examiner judgement had excellent reliability; yet the individual modifiability measures (with the exception of disruption and frustration) had poor reliability. Conclusion: In concordance with a previous study, results indicate that a dynamic assessment of inferential word learning may be an efficacious method of identifying language disorders in school-age populations.

The purpose of this study was to investigate preliminary psychometric normative data of an English dynamic assessment of narrative language for a group of diverse school-age students with and without language disorder. This study included 364 diverse students with and without language disorder ranging from kindergarten through 6th grade. Students were confirmed as having a language disorder if they had an existing active IEP for language, and scores below a certain cutoff point on a nonword repetition (NWR) task and the narrative language measure (NLM). English language proficiency was investigated, and students were classified as being a dual language learner (DLL) based on student, teacher, or parent report of diverse home language, and poor performance on an English narrative language assessment. Participants were administered a nonword repetition task (NWR), the Narrative Language Measure (NLM), and the Dynamic Assessment of Oral Narrative Discourse (the DYMOND). Data were analyzed within groups of typically developing students and students with a language disorder to identify statistically different mean modifiability and posttest scores given various demographic factors. Results of this study indicate that modifiability and posttest scores for typically developing students were not found to be statistically different given gender or school location, however, significant differences were noted given grade and level of English proficiency or DLL status. The group of students with a disorder demonstrated no statistically different mean modifiability scores given any demographic factor. Students with a language disorder demonstrated significantly different mean posttest scores given school location and English proficiency and DLL status. Results from this study are consistent with previous dynamic assessment research in demonstrating excellent classification accuracy in culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) populations. Students may benefit from a norm-referenced dynamic assessment of narrative language in order to provide less-biased standardized forms of assessment for CLD populations.

Dynamic assessment constitutes an alternative diagnostic approach, focused on revelation of the tested person's learning potential, which is reached and observed via the emphasis on the process of the achievement. It aims at meaningful connection with the intervention that immediately makes use of diagnostic findings to support the development of an individual's abilities. This work summarizes essential information about the mentioned diagnostic trend - its characteristic, a definition compared to conventional ways of testing and historical development. It investigates some possibilities of its utilization, especially in the area of preschool diagnostic and education, and creates a basis for an instrument of the effective prevention of educational and behavioural difficulties during the first years of the school attendance.