Dynamic Assessment

Dynamic assessment is a kind of interactive assessment used in education and the helping professions, developed from the research of developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky. It distinguishes constructs a student has already mastered, the zone of actual development, from constructs the student can currently complete only with scaffolding, the zone of proximal development, and from constructs the student cannot yet do at all. The procedure is highly interactive and process oriented rather than product oriented, and has become popular among educators, psychologists, and speech and language pathologists as an alternative to mastery-based measurement, though its cost has historically limited wide-scale adoption. Vygotsky's theory holds that measuring the outer limit of a student's zone of proximal development is a more accurate measure of development than measuring only what the student can already do alone, since concepts within that zone move into independent mastery within a few years.