Dynamic assessment as a predictor of reading development: a systematic review

Abstract

Assessments of reading and reading-related skills which measure acquired knowledge may pose problems for the prediction of future reading performance. Such static measures often result in floor effects in the early stages of reading instruction, and may be particularly inaccurate predictors for children from culturally and linguistically diverse (CLD) backgrounds. Dynamic assessment (DA), in contrast, focuses on learning potential by measuring response to teaching, and may therefore be a less biased form of assessment. We conducted a systematic review of the literature to assess the ability of dynamic measures of reading and related skills to predict variance in the growth of children’s reading skills over time. Seventeen peer-reviewed articles met inclusion criteria, representing 18 studies published between 1992 and 2020. After static predictors were accounted for, dynamic measures of phonological awareness and decoding explained a significant amount of variance in the growth of word reading accuracy (1–21%) and word reading fluency (typically 1–9%), while variance in reading comprehension outcomes was accounted for by dynamic measures of morphological awareness (4–33.4%) and one dynamic decoding assessment (1%). Finally, a single paired-associate nonword learning task predicted 6% unique variance in future nonword reading accuracy and fluency. Results support the ability of DA to tap into variance unexplained by traditional static measures, though no studies explicitly examined the validity of DA for children from CLD backgrounds. We call for future studies of DA of reading to adopt longer developmental windows and assess proximal as well as distal reading outcome measures.