Dynamic Assessment: What It Is and How Teachers Can Use It

A traditional assessment usually asks a fairly straightforward question:

What can this student do right now?

Dynamic assessment asks another question that can sometimes be just as useful:

What happens when I give the student some help?

That sounds like a small difference. It really isn’t.

Suppose two students miss the same reading-comprehension question. On a conventional assessment, both answers may simply be marked wrong.

Now give each student a small prompt.

One student immediately recognizes the mistake and corrects it. The other still isn’t sure what to do.

Give another prompt. Maybe ask the students to go back to a particular paragraph, identify the relevant information, or explain what they were thinking.

Again, their responses may be very different.

The original score told us that both students got the question wrong. The interaction tells us something about how readily each student can use support to move toward a better answer.

That is the basic idea behind dynamic assessment.

And, like quite a few educational ideas, it sounds more mysterious when we use the official terminology than it does when we actually look at what is happening.

What Is Dynamic Assessment?

Dynamic assessment is an approach in which assessment and instruction are deliberately combined.

Instead of giving a task, recording the student’s performance, and stopping there, the teacher or examiner intervenes in some way. That intervention might involve a hint, question, demonstration, strategy, piece of feedback, or gradually increasing level of support.

The student’s response to that help becomes part of the assessment information.

Researchers have used different models of dynamic assessment, but two common approaches are test–teach–retest and graduated prompting. In test–teach–retest, a learner first attempts a task, receives instruction or mediation, and then attempts the task or related material again. Graduated prompting uses a sequence of increasingly explicit prompts to see how much support a learner needs to succeed.

The important part is not merely that help was provided.

Teachers help students all day.

What makes the process useful as assessment is that we pay attention to what changes when the help is provided.

Static Assessment and Dynamic Assessment Tell Us Different Things

The word static can sound vaguely insulting, as though ordinary assessments are old-fashioned and dynamic assessment is the shiny new replacement.

That isn’t a particularly useful way to look at it.

A traditional assessment can tell us important things.

Can the student solve the problem independently?

Does the student remember the vocabulary?

Can the student read the passage at the expected level?

Did the student master the material taught during the unit?

Sometimes that is precisely what we need to know.

Dynamic assessment gives us a different kind of information.

It can help us notice:

• what kind of support gets the student moving;
• how much support is needed;
• whether the student can use feedback;
• whether a strategy transfers to a similar problem;
• whether the student becomes less dependent on help;
• and whether an initially weak performance changes substantially with instruction.

Research on dynamic assessment often describes this in terms of learning potential or responsiveness to mediation rather than treating the learner’s initial performance as the entire story.

Neither kind of information makes the other useless.

Sometimes I think education gets itself into trouble by insisting that every useful idea has to defeat and replace the previous useful idea.

It doesn’t.

Sometimes you need to know what a student can do independently.

Sometimes you need to know what might happen with the right support.

Those are different questions.

A Simple Classroom Example

Imagine a student is trying to solve this problem:

A school bought 168 pencils and divided them equally among 6 classrooms. How many pencils did each classroom receive?

The student reads the problem and stops.

A conventional assessment might record that as incorrect or incomplete.

With a dynamic approach, you might begin with very limited help.

Prompt 1:
“What is the problem asking you to find?”

If that is enough, useful information has already emerged. The student may understand the mathematics but have needed help identifying the question.

If not, try something slightly more explicit.

Prompt 2:
“What information in the problem seems important?”

Still stuck?

Prompt 3:
“If 168 pencils are being shared equally among six classrooms, what operation could help us?”

And if necessary:

Prompt 4:
“Try 168 ÷ 6.”

At that point, the interesting information isn’t simply whether the student eventually got 28.

It is where the student began moving.

A student who succeeds after the first question presents a different instructional problem from a student who cannot continue until the operation is supplied.

The original incorrect response hid that difference.

Graduated Prompts: Start Small

One practical way to borrow from dynamic assessment is to use a ladder of prompts.

Begin with the least help likely to be useful and become more explicit only when necessary.

For example:

1. Pause or ask for another attempt.
   “Take another look.”
2. Ask the student to explain the problem.
   “What are you trying to figure out?”
3. Direct attention without giving the answer.
   “Look again at the second paragraph.”
4. Remind the student of a relevant strategy.
   “What did we do yesterday when we had a problem like this?”
5. Give a more specific cue.
   “Try drawing a number line.”
6. Model part of the process.
   “Watch what I do with the first step.”
7. Provide the needed information and then try another example.

The exact sequence will depend on the task. The principle is what matters.

If you begin by supplying the answer, you learn very little about what support the student actually needed.

Don’t Just Notice Whether the Student Gets It Right

This is probably the most important part.

During dynamic assessment, the final answer is only one piece of information.

Watch what happens along the way.

How quickly does the student respond to a prompt?

One small cue may be enough to restart the student’s thinking.

That is different from needing repeated explanation.

What kind of help works?

Does the student benefit from a question?

A worked example?

A visual representation?

Having the directions rephrased?

Being reminded of a previously learned strategy?

Does the student use the help?

Students do not always make use of feedback merely because we provide it.

That itself is useful information.

Can the student explain what changed?

If a student can say, “I was subtracting because I saw the word left, but now I see that the quantities have to be combined first,” that tells us considerably more than a corrected answer by itself.

Does the learning transfer?

This may be the big one.

After helping with one problem, give the student a similar-but-not-identical problem.

Can the student use the strategy without receiving all the same prompts again?

Research using graduated prompting similarly looks at the amount and type of support required and whether performance changes with mediation.

Dynamic Assessment in Reading

Reading gives us plenty of situations where a wrong answer doesn’t explain the problem.

A student may misunderstand a passage because of vocabulary.

Another may read the words accurately but fail to connect ideas across paragraphs.

Another may understand the passage but misunderstand the question.

Another may answer too quickly without returning to the text.

Those students can all miss the same comprehension question.

So instead of merely recording the error, try a sequence such as:

“Show me the part of the text that helped you answer.”

“Which sentence seems most important?”

“What does this word mean in this paragraph?”

“What happened immediately before this event?”

“Does your answer fit with what the author says here?”

Then see what happens.

Dynamic assessment has been studied in reading and language contexts partly because responsiveness to instruction can reveal information that an initial static score alone does not provide.

Again, this does not mean every reading test should turn into a tutoring session.

It means that when you are trying to understand why a student is struggling, interaction can reveal things a score cannot.

Dynamic Assessment in Math

Math may be one of the easiest places to use the idea informally.

A wrong answer can come from all sorts of places:

• misunderstanding the problem;
• selecting the wrong operation;
• forgetting a fact;
• losing track of a multi-step procedure;
• misunderstanding place value;
• applying a memorized rule incorrectly;
• or making a simple calculation error.

Rather than immediately reteaching everything, probe.

“Tell me what you did first.”

“Why did you choose multiplication?”

“Can you draw what is happening?”

“Show me where you became unsure.”

“What would happen if the numbers were smaller?”

“Does your answer seem reasonable?”

A student’s response can help determine what to teach next.

That is a much more useful result than discovering only that the answer was wrong.

Dynamic Assessment in Writing

Writing also lends itself to this kind of thinking because a finished piece can hide where the trouble began.

Suppose a student writes a weak paragraph.

Instead of simply marking everything that needs fixing, intervene gradually.

“Read this paragraph and tell me what you want the reader to understand.”

“Which sentence states that idea most clearly?”

“Which detail supports it?”

“Is there anything here that doesn’t belong?”

“Where could the reader use more explanation?”

The teacher isn’t merely correcting the paragraph. The teacher is finding out which questions or strategies help the student recognize and improve the problem.

Then comes the important part: give the student another opportunity to use that thinking more independently.

Otherwise, we may have improved one paragraph without learning much about whether the student learned to improve the next one.

Dynamic Assessment in Science and Inquiry

Science provides another natural fit.

Students can be asked to predict, observe, explain, interpret evidence, or revise an explanation.

Suppose a student draws the wrong conclusion from an experiment.

Rather than immediately correcting it:

“What did you observe?”

“Which observation supports your conclusion?”

“Is there any evidence that doesn’t fit?”

“What else could explain the result?”

“What would you test next?”

Those questions can reveal whether the student needs more scientific knowledge, help interpreting evidence, or simply a push to examine the evidence more carefully.

This overlaps naturally with inquiry-based learning and critical thinking because the teacher is interested not only in whether students reach a conclusion but in how their reasoning changes when they encounter questions and evidence.

This Sounds a Lot Like Formative Assessment

It does.

There is considerable overlap.

Both formative and dynamic assessment can involve gathering evidence during learning and using it to determine what happens next.

The difference is mainly one of emphasis.

Formative assessment is a broad category. An exit ticket, mini-quiz, classroom question, or quick check for understanding can all be used formatively.

Dynamic assessment focuses more specifically on the learner’s response to deliberate support or mediation during the assessment process.

Think of it this way:

A formative assessment might tell you:

“Maria does not yet understand equivalent fractions.”

A dynamic assessment might help you discover:

“Maria can identify equivalent fractions once she represents them visually, and after two examples she can use the representation independently.”

The second statement gives you some pretty obvious ideas about what to do tomorrow.

Dynamic Assessment Can Help With Differentiation

One of the difficulties with differentiated instruction is figuring out what support students actually need.

It is easy to make assumptions.

A student who performs poorly may get easier work when the real problem was misunderstanding the directions.

Another student may appear to need constant assistance when one particular strategy would allow much greater independence.

Dynamic assessment can help teachers make smaller, more specific decisions.

Instead of:

“Jordan is low in math.”

You may discover:

“Jordan understands the concept when the quantities are represented visually but has trouble translating a word problem into an equation.”

That is far more actionable.

It describes a learning need instead of turning a current performance level into a student label.

It May Also Be Useful With Multilingual Learners

Assessment can become complicated when a student’s language proficiency and the skill being assessed are tangled together.

A weak performance may reflect limited experience with the language of the task rather than the underlying ability we intended to measure.

Dynamic assessment has therefore received considerable attention in language assessment, including work with bilingual and multilingual children, because examining how students respond to teaching can add information beyond an initial static performance.

That does not mean a classroom teacher should use an informal dynamic activity to diagnose a language disorder or make other clinical decisions.

Formal diagnosis belongs with appropriately trained professionals using suitable tools.

But the classroom principle is still useful:

When language may be interfering with performance, find out what happens when the student receives clarification, modeling, vocabulary support, or another appropriate scaffold.

The response can help guide instruction.

The Practical Problem: Time

Here comes the less exciting part.

Dynamic assessment takes interaction.

Interaction takes time.

If you imagine individually conducting elaborate test–teach–retest sessions with 28 students every Friday afternoon, you have designed a wonderful system for making sure you never see your family again.

Formal dynamic assessment procedures can indeed be intensive, and researchers have explored computerized approaches partly because individualized mediation is difficult to scale.

For a classroom teacher, the more realistic approach is usually selective.

Use it when the additional information matters.

A student keeps making the same error.

Two students have similar scores but seem to need very different help.

A conventional assessment leaves you wondering what the student actually understands.

You are trying to decide what kind of scaffold to provide.

You want to know whether recent instruction changed the student’s ability to approach a task.

That is where a few minutes of carefully chosen prompting may be worth much more than another worksheet.

You Don’t Need to Dynamically Assess Everything

This deserves its own heading because educational ideas have an unfortunate habit of becoming requirements.

Dynamic assessment is a tool.

It is not a lifestyle.

You don’t need a prompt hierarchy for a spelling quiz if all you need to know is whether students can spell the words independently.

You don’t need to mediate every problem on a unit test if the point of the test is to find out what students can do independently.

And you certainly don’t need to turn every interaction with a struggling student into some elaborate assessment protocol.

Sometimes a kid is stuck.

You give a hint.

The kid gets unstuck.

Life goes on.

The value of dynamic assessment comes when you deliberately pay attention to what kind of help made the difference.

That information can help you decide what to teach, what to practice, what scaffold to provide, and—just as importantly—when to start taking that scaffold away.

Keep a Simple Record When It Matters

Most classroom uses of dynamic assessment do not require elaborate documentation.

If you are trying to track a particular student’s progress, though, a few brief notes can be surprisingly useful.

You might record:

• the task the student attempted;
• what the student could do independently;
• the first prompt or support provided;
• how the student responded;
• whether additional support was needed;
• and whether the student could perform a similar task afterward with less help.

That gives you something more useful than:

“Still struggling with fractions.”

You might instead write:

“Can compare fractions with unlike denominators after being prompted to draw a visual model. Needed the reminder on the first two problems; used the model independently on the third.”

Now we have something we can actually work with.

It also gives us a way to notice progress that may not immediately show up in a conventional score.

A student may still need support, but needing less support than last month matters.

Be Careful About What Dynamic Assessment Can Tell You

Dynamic assessment can give teachers useful instructional information.

That does not mean every classroom interaction becomes a formal diagnostic assessment.

There is a difference between saying:

“This student responded well when I broke the task into smaller steps.”

and saying:

“Therefore I know exactly why this student is struggling.”

The first may be a reasonable classroom observation.

The second can go well beyond what the evidence supports.

Student performance can be affected by prior knowledge, language, attention, motivation, familiarity with the task, the particular prompt used, and plenty of other things.

So I would treat dynamic assessment as another source of evidence—not a magic window into a student’s brain.

That seems like a fairly healthy rule for assessment in general.

The Goal Is Not More Help. It Is Better Information.

There is an interesting trap here.

Once we start thinking about dynamic assessment, it can sound as though giving more support is always better.

It isn’t.

If we provide so much help that the student barely has to think, we have stopped learning much about the student’s learning.

Good support should help reveal what the student can do next.

Then, when possible, we reduce it.

Prompt.

Watch.

Adjust.

Try again.

And eventually see whether the student can carry more of the thinking independently.

That gradual movement toward independence is part of what makes the information useful.

What Dynamic Assessment Adds

A conventional assessment often gives us an answer we need:

What can this student do independently right now?

Dynamic assessment adds another:

What can this student do when given appropriate support, and what happens as that support changes?

Neither question is sufficient for every situation.

If I want to know whether a student has mastered multiplication facts, independent performance matters.

If I am trying to figure out why the same student repeatedly gets stuck on multi-step problems, simply giving another score may not tell me very much.

That is where dynamic assessment becomes interesting.

It asks us to look at mistakes a little differently.

Instead of seeing an incorrect answer only as the end of an assessment, sometimes we can treat it as the beginning of an investigation.

What happens if I ask a question?

What happens if I point something out?

What happens if I model one step?

What happens when I back away again?

Sometimes the most useful information is not that a student needed help.

It is discovering which help worked—and how quickly the student stopped needing it.