Workshop: Dynamic Assessment
Date/time: July 23 - 25, 2012, 9:30 am to 4:30 pm
Location: The Pennsylvania State University, University Park campus
Registration Information: http://calper.la.psu.edu/profdev.php?page=reg
Description: Dynamic Assessment (DA) offers a fundamentally different perspective on what constitutes assessment and how assessments should be carried out and interpreted than the image of the lone individual completing a standardized test or responding to questions during an oral interview. According to DA, this type of solo performance reveals only a part of an individual’s capabilities; the rest can only be captured by providing support when s/he struggles with tasks and then carefully tracing how much support the individual required and how responsive s/he was to the support. What looks like a simple idea has far-reaching implications for how we understand the role of assessment in education. In the L2 field, the last several years have seen a number of projects carried out with classroom teachers documenting how DA principles allow them to integrate teaching and assessment during their interactions with individual learners and groups. More recently, DA was used as the basis for designing computerized measures of listening and reading comprehension here at CALPER.
In this workshop, participants will gain familiarity with the theories and models associated with DA and engage in discussion and collaborative analysis of a number of video-clips showing teachers using DA with learners, and will have the opportunity to experience DA themselves as we explore items from the CALPER online DA comprehension tests. Lastly, participants will get insights into ongoing projects involving L2 teachers’ uses of DA in a range of educational contexts and will be invited to design their own applications of DA in consultation with the presenter.
Note: This interactive workshop is organized in a way to accommodate those new to Dynamic Assessment as well as those who are already familiar with this framework (and may have participated in past CALPER workshops addressing the topic). The first day of the workshop will provide the theoretical background of DA and will serve as either an introduction or review, depending upon the background of individual participants. The second and third days of the workshop will be devoted to recent and ongoing DA projects in L2 educational settings.
Presenter: Matthew Poehner (CALPER)
Event website: http://calper.la.psu.edu/profdev.php?page=workshops
Contact Person: Gabriela Appel, CALPER Program Coordinator, gxa9@psu.edu