The Development of Dynamic Assessment as a Nonbiased Language Assessment (Pilot Study)

The following hypotheses will be examined in this project:

Hypothesis 1: Children from culturally diverse backgrounds will score significantly below the published norm on standardized tests of lexical acquisition (The PPVT-III and The Expressive Vocabulary Test), creating a pool of participants who appear to have significant clinical language disorders, but who are, in fact, a heterogeneous group of typically developing children and a subgroup with language disorders.

Hypothesis 2: Dynamic assessment, in the form of lexical fast mapping intervention, will distinguish the aforementioned pool into groups with both typical and disordered patterns. That is, the dynamic assessments procedures will reveal a significantly different performance pattern in the children from culturally diverse backgrounds who score low on standardize measures.

The research design will have a total of 20 African American children as participants. Each participant will be assessed with two standardized vocabulary instruments. It is anticipated based on past research (Washington & Craig, 1999; Champion, Hyter, McCabe & Bland-Stewart (in review), that a large number of children who are typically language developing will score one to two standard deviations below the norm. Participants will enter an intervention program, which will be followed up by social validity procedures to ascertain language function at home.