Page 9 - Microsoft PowerPoint - Dynamic Assessment Ebook - Bilinguistics

DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT’S

ALTER EGO

Outside of testing, dynamic assessment masquerades as

another activity that even professionals with one year of
experience have mastered.

It’s called Trial Therapy.

It goes like this: You make a communication request to a child.

They can’t do it. You change the request making it easier, such
as shortening the phrase or making the word smaller. If they still

can’t produce it, you make it easier again until they are
successful with your help.

If they get it, you stay there until they master it at that level.

Dynamic assessment is just the evaluation version of trial
therapy. Instead of testing your therapy prompts, you are testing
the standardized testing prompts. Instead of focusing on

progress, you are writing goals.

Let’s walk through a simple example of what is actually going on

in the head of a speech language pathologist when they are
using dynamic assessment to determine whether 1) a child truly

has a speech or language disorder and 2) if so, what should be
focused on in therapy.
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