What is it about?
Most assessments of critical word reading skills (e.g., phonological awareness, sound symbol knowledge and decoding) are static in nature, meaning they evaluate a child’s acquired knowledge. Bilingual children often underperform relative to English monolinguals for whom these tests are developed because their acquired linguistic knowledge is different. At-risk children also underperform on these tests because of their limited previous literacy experiences. This leads to misidentification of reading difficulties and misallocation of resources. We investigate whether bilinguals and at-risk children also underperform relative to their monolingual and typically developing peers on dynamic assessments of word reading skills. In dynamic assessment the tester evaluates a child’s ability to learn skills rather than their acquired knowledge, through incorporating teaching, prompts and feedback in the test. This approach has the potential to reduce linguistic and experiential bias. We find that dynamic assessment may be a more equitable alternative and/or supplement to traditional static word reading skill assessments for bilingual and at-risk children ages 4-7.
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Why is it important?
In this review paper we analyze outcomes from 35 unique studies to examine whether dynamic assessments of word reading skills demonstrate consistent criterion reference validity with word reading outcome measures across diverse population groups, including mono and bilinguals, and at-risk and typically developing children. Findings provide preliminary evidence that dynamic assessments can be used as a less-biased alternative to static tests for bilinguals and corroborate previous research indicating that dynamic assessments can be used as a supplement to static tests for at-risk students to determine who truly has difficulty and requires support.
Perspectives
We hope that after reading this review paper, professionals like speech-language pathologists will consider incorporating dynamic assessments of word reading skills into their evaluation of bilingual and at-risk children’s early word reading skills. The assessment tools we choose to use matter. They impact test outcomes and a child’s academic trajectory. It is therefore critical that we choose fair and equitable assessments.
Emily Wood
University of Toronto
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Dynamic Assessments of Word Reading Skills in Diverse School-Age Children: A Meta-Analysis, Perspectives of the ASHA Special Interest Groups, March 2024, American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA),
DOI: 10.1044/2024_persp-23-00262.
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