H. Carl Haywood

Applications and Challenges in Dynamic Assessment.

Dynamic assessment is described as a subset of interactive assessment that includes deliberate and planned mediational teaching and the assessment of the effects of that teaching on subsequent performance. Its historical roots are traced to Vygotsky and Feuerstein and rests on four assumptions: (a) Accumulated knowledge is not the best indication of ability to acquire new knowledge. (b) Everyone functions at less than 100% of capacity. (c) The best test of any performance is a sample of that performance. (d) There are many obstacles that can mask ones ability; when the obstacles are removed, greater ability than was suspected is often revealed. The authors review what is known so far about dynamic assessment and give examples of its utility as a tool for research and clinical work in psychopathology, neuropsychology, education, the study of cultural differences, and developmental research. Some persistent problems are noted as well.

Intrinsic Motivation and Behavior Effectiveness in Retarded Persons

Publisher Summary This chapter examines the relationships between “task intrinsic motivation,” and the behavior effectiveness of mentally retarded persons within the context of a historical view of research on personality variables and mental retardation. Individual differences in motivational orientation have been shown to be reliably measurable down to mental age (MA) 3 years, to appear in mentally retarded and nonretarded persons, to be correlated with chronological age, mental age, social class, and IQ, and to be associated with effectiveness of laboratory learning and levels of school achievement. There are strong indications that such individual differences are also associated with mental health, work satisfaction, and social adjustment. Behavioral effectiveness is achieved most readily when incentives are matched to individual differences in motivational orientation. Relatively intrinsically motivated persons work harder and longer, choose higher performance goals, and set leaner schedules of reinforcement for themselves than do relatively extrinsically motivated persons. Retarded persons who are relatively more intrinsically motivated are capable of more self-regulating behavior and may be able to function more effectively in independent living situations than will extrinsically motivated persons of comparable age, sex, and IQ. There are suggestions that motivational orientation may be modifiable with relatively intense, prolonged, and appropriate treatment.

Psychoeducational Assessment from a Transactional Perspective

Psychological assessment takes place within a logical context that is at least conceptual, and ideally theoretical, whether or not that conceptual context is explicit and well understood by practitioners. Psychological assessment that is done for educational purposes, that is, psychoeducational assessment, is undertaken in a special context: the effort to construct effective programs of education based upon individual characteristics and needs of students. On the assumption that the ability to profit from school experience varies as a function of individual differences in intelligence, school and educational psychologists and educators have traditionally spent the largest portion of their assessment time assessing ability. Unfortunately, such persons often are not operating on the basis of explicitly stated concepts of the nature and development of ability, or of what latent variables underlie individual differences in school achievement. Thus, practitioners may set out to assess individual differences in ability without actually understanding what they themselves believe to be the nature, modes of development, and various manifestations of the very ability that they seek to assess!

Interactive Assessment as a Research Tool

Dynamic/interactive approaches to psychological assessment make it possible to get information that would not be available from the use of other assessment methods. This utility rests on the concept of induced change as a research tactic, that is, inferring the nature of phenomena by deliberately and calculatedly changing them and then assessing the effects of those changes on criterion variables. Studies are reviewed showing how interactive assessment yielded new knowledge in the domains of psychopathology; neuropsychology; learning disabilities; intelligence testing in normally developing, deaf, and immigrant children; and evaluation of educational programs. Some ways in which interactive assessment procedures need improvement are discussed, principally with respect to their measurement characteristics.

Thinking In, Around, and About the Curriculum: The Role of Cognitive Education.

Although everybody agrees that education reform is needed, there is little agreement on the nature of the problems, and certainly not on the remedies; nevertheless, there is a central focus on curriculum issues. Three principal points are addressed in this paper: (a) new approaches in education are urgently needed, (b) new educational approaches require revised concepts of the nature and development of human abilities, and (c) those new concepts must lead inevitably to emphasis on the acquisition, growth, and application of systematic processes of logical thinking, which is to say, “cognitive” or “metacognitive” education. The author presents a “transactional perspective” on human abilities, with three principal components: intelligence, cognitive processes, and intrinsic motivation. Intelligence and cognitive processes differ with respect to their respective sources, their relative modifiability, their composition, methods of assessment, and the role of parents and teachers in their development. Individu...Although everybody agrees that education reform is needed, there is little agreement on the nature of the problems, and certainly not on the remedies; nevertheless, there is a central focus on curriculum issues. Three principal points are addressed in this paper: (a) new approaches in education are urgently needed, (b) new educational approaches require revised concepts of the nature and development of human abilities, and (c) those new concepts must lead inevitably to emphasis on the acquisition, growth, and application of systematic processes of logical thinking, which is to say, “cognitive” or “metacognitive” education. The author presents a “transactional perspective” on human abilities, with three principal components: intelligence, cognitive processes, and intrinsic motivation. Intelligence and cognitive processes differ with respect to their respective sources, their relative modifiability, their composition, methods of assessment, and the role of parents and teachers in their development. Individual differences in intrinsic motivation are associated with differences in learning effectiveness that are not accounted for by the other two components of the transactional model, which is transactional rather than merely interactive because the ability of any one of the three principal components to influence development of either or both of the other two changes with each effect of one upon another. Two programs of cognitive education, one for preschool children, the other for older children, adolescents, and adults, are described and data are presented showing that systematic classroom application of such programs by well trained teachers can lead to enhancement of cognitive development, intrinsic motivation, and even IQ. Further, relatively long‐term evaluative studies demonstrate that there are positive and long‐lasting effects of cognitive education on subsequent learning and school achievement. Figure 11. School achievement scores, grades 1 and 2, of Bright Start and low‐SES control children (Paour et al., 2000). Figure 10. Percentage of passing grades in French and Math on a national examination, for the national standardisation sample, the high‐SES controls, the low‐SES Bright Start children, and the low‐SES control children. (Paour et al., 2000).

Young children's problem-solving strategies: An observational study

Abstract The purpose of this study was to identify features of young childrens behavior that contribute to effective problem solving. Twenty-four 4- and 5-year-old children, half from low SES families and half from high SES families, were observed while performing perceptual/performance cognitive tasks. Frequency of behavior that reflected problem-solving strategies was recorded. Results are discussed in terms of functional variables that are responsible for SES differences in performance. Problem-solving strategy score was associated with 59% of the variance in test performance. Significant SES differences were found in the strategy score, and when specific behavior categories were examined, SES differences were found in four of the five categories (Visual Scanning, Trial and Error Responding, Impulsive Responding, Helpless Confirmation Seeking).

Twenty Years of IACEP, and a Focus on Dynamic Assessment: Progress, Problems, and Prospects

This 20th anniversary address charts a brief history of the International Association for Cognitive Education and Psychology, from its organizational conference at Lake Louise in November 1988. International conferences, regional conferences, and successive presidents are listed (and pictured in the case of presidents). Introducing the theme of the conference, the history of dynamic assessment is outlined, with photographs of the pioneers and some present leaders. Problems with standard normative testing are listed. The principal argument is that appropriate assessment methods depend upon valid models of the nature of human abilities. One model, Haywood’s transactional perspective, is outlined briefly.

Dynamic Assessment of Adults with Traumatic Brain Injuries

45 adults who had suffered traumatic brain injuries were examined, using a group form of dynamic assessment. The purposes were (a) to determine the applicability of group dynamic assessment in this population, and (b) to determine whether even short-term and transient gains in performance would be possible in persons who are years past the acute phase of their brain injuries. Three principal instruments were used: Rey’s Complex Figure (CF), Haywood’s Test of Verbal Abstracting (TVA), and the Representational Stencil Design Test (RSDT) from the Learning Potential Assessment Device of Feuerstein et al., plus a series of verbal memory tests that we attached to the TVA. 21 of the participants were given group mediation of basic cognitive and metacognitive operations, between pre-testing and post-testing, whereas the 24 participants in the control condition were given no mediation beyond that necessary to understand what was required in the tasks. Instead, they worked on alternative tasks. In all cases the sequence was Introduction and Instructions, Pretest (no mediation), Period of Training (mediation of essential cognitive and metacognitive strategies) or alternative activities, Posttest (no mediation). In addition to the interposed cognitive mediation, administration of the TVA included 2- and 5-exemplar versions of two forms, A and B, of the test, thus yielding four verbal abstracting scores: A-2 (Form A with 2 exemplars; “In what way are yellow and brown alike?”), A-5 (“In what way are yellow, brown, green, purple, and orange alike?”), B-2, and B-5. As expected, initial performance was quite low on all of these. The data revealed improved performance following intervention on all of these tasks for the participants in the mediated condition. On the average, participants in the control samples started out at a higher level of performance than did those in the mediated condition, making clear interpretation somewhat difficult. On the TVA, the greatest improvement in verbal abstracting performance was observed between A-2 and A-5; that is, the addition of 3 more exemplars of each concept appeared to make a great difference in both groups. There was also significant differential improvement between A-2 and B-2, showing a positive effect of metacognitive mediation on verbal abstracting. There was no mediation for verbal memory, so little change was expected on the memory tests; however, data from the word memory tests suggested that mediation of metacognitive strategies can improve verbal memory performance, possibly by encouraging the use of categorizing strategies. On the CF, group mediation of organization, planning, and attention led to modest improvement in the copying score but a dramatic improvement in producing the figure from memory; i.e., production of the figure from memory after the period of mediation showed a great improvement both in number of elements recalled and placed in the drawing and in organization and sequence. On the RSDT, undoubtedly the most cognitively complex of these tasks, initial performance was poor, as expected, but there was substantial improvement following a period of mediational training.

A Transactional Perspective on Mental Retardation

Publisher Summary This chapter proposes a “transactional perspective on human ability” to understand variability in behavior and development in general and applies that perspective to the phenomena of mental retardation. The transactional perspective rests on the three constructs: intelligence, cognitive processes, and motivation, principally task‐intrinsic motivation. Intelligence and cognitive processes are sharply distinguished from each other. Implications of the transactional perspective on human ability are drawn for developmental intervention in the lives of individuals with mental retardation. The transactional perspective fulfills the requirements for new conceptions of intelligence and of mental retardation. The tripartite conception encompasses phenomena that intelligence alone cannot explain, and integrates those phenomena into a comprehensive scheme. Although cognition and motivation are not themselves directly observable, they are no less so than is intelligence. In fact, all three must be inferred from their presumed effects upon other, more directly observable, phenomena, especially the behavior of persons who are thought to vary in intelligence, cognition, and/or motivation. All three concepts are developmental ones, and it is possible to construct and to test models for their ontogenesis, not only separately but also, more importantly, with respect to their transactional effects upon each other and upon developing persons. All three are important individual differences variables that are both dynamic and transactional.

Self-reinforcement schedules in young children: effects of motivational orientation and instructional demands

Abstract The effects of external (environmental) and internal (cognitive) self regulatory influences on self-reinforcement behavior were investigated in 32 pre-school age children (3.1 to 5.8 years, M = 4.7 years). External conditions were two demand conditions (stringent instructional sets and lenient instructional sets). The “internal variable” was an individual differences one, motivational orientation: One-half of the children were relatively intrinsically motivated (IM) and the other half were relatively extrinsically motivated (EM). Both external and internal selfinfluences affected self-reinforcement performance on a motor/attention task. Children in the stringent-demand condition set a higher performance standard and arranged a leaner schedule of self-reinforcement than did children in the lenient-demand condition. EM children out performed IM children on measures reflecting the strength of performance (total work behavior and total time working). On measures reflecting internal standards of self-regulation, IM children set a higher performance standard in the lenient-demand condition than did EM children. Also, IM children chose a higher performance standard than modeled in the lenient-demand condition than did EM children. This experiment shows that in pre-school age children internal self-regulatory characteristics are present, well organized, and active, which interact with external demand conditions of the environment to reveal substantial individual differences in the patterns of self-reward behavior.