DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT IN IDENTIFICATION OF CHILDREN AT RISK FOR READING AND WRITING DIFFICULTIES

Author(s):

Salvius Alois Kumburu

Conference:

ECER 2008

Network:

5. Children and Youth at Risk and Urban Education

Format:

Paper

Session Information

05 SES 10, Children and Youth at Risk (Part 4)

Paper Session

Time:

2008-09-12

14:45-16:15

Room:

B1 135

Chair:

Ruth Leitch

Contribution

DYNAMIC ASSESSMENT IN IDENTIFICATION OF CHILDREN AT RISK FOR READING AND WRITING DIFFICULTIES Salvius.Kumburu@abo.fi ABSTRACT The aim of the study is to create and evaluate an intervention program for Tanzanian children with reading and writing difficulties. These difficulties are frequent, but not well understood in Tanzania. The design of the study is a randomized experiment with one experiment and two control groups. For the experiment and the control groups a total of 75 children from grade one are screened from a population of 300 children in a low income urban area in Dar es Salaam. One third of the children, the experiment group, will participate in an intensive training program in Swahili language literacy skills for three months, aimed at promoting the reading and writing ability, while the children in the control groups will have mathematics versus no special program. This paper is focusing on the screening process for identifying the children at risk of having reading and writing difficulties. Earlier research has identified components, e.g. letter knowledge, letter sound knowledge, phonological tasks, reading, writing digit span and reading comprehension which are sensitive in the risk perspective and should be included in the assessment. The plan is to use dynamic assessment for the identification, as it is expected to be more reliable than traditional screening tests, when the children in focus probably have a background of low stimulation for reading and writing. With the traditional screening tests it is most likely that many children, who have not been exposed to language stimulating activities at home would be classified as children at risk. It is believed that we could avoid at least part of the problem by using a dynamic approach. In Tanzania most of the school classes have a big number of children and consequently most of the activities can not be planned to be carried out directly on individual level. The idea in this study is then to try to develop and adapt the dynamic assessment in a group approach. The paper presents thus the group based dynamic assessment, the experiences, the usefulness and the results. Descriptors: intervention dynamic assessment children at risk reading writing

Method

A. Identification: Train-Pre-test-Train -Post -test ( With group test) B. Itervention: Experimental design. Randomized experiment. R o1 X 01, 2 R 01 X 01, 2 R 01 01, 2 01=pre-test, 2another post test. X1=intervention.X2= parallel program, -No special program R=random assignment to the three groups. Instruments:Inetrview Questions, test battery, notebook, reading cards (Swahili language)

Expected Outcomes

The dynamic assessment approach might prove to be most useful in identifying children at risk of having reading and writing difficulties in Tanzania.

References

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Author Information

Salvius Alois Kumburu

Abo Akademi University

Special Education

DODOMA

216

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