Dynamic assessment, tutor mediation and academic writing development: Shrestha and Coffin (2012)

Shrestha and Coffin (2012) wrote an interesting article on dynamic assessment in writing context. Interesting, in the sense that they used written comments to dispense the mediation, as opposed to face to face interaction as it is usually the case. The mediation in their study, also called “text mediation”, is not only given to the students by a human mediator but also provided through the means of computers. Furthermore, the article is well detailed with respect to the methods applied, which is of the utmost importance, especially in the event of replication. The paucity of details in describing the methods is generally considered as a drawback in dynamic assessment research.

The authors investigated the value of mediation in the context of academic writing development. They followed two undergraduate business studies students and mediated the performance of their students mainly through the means of emails. Their results corroborate others’ studies that mediation, going from implicit to explicit, is a good indicator to track the development of learners, and that each learner requires different levels of assistance due to varying zones of proximal development.

References

Shrestha, P., & Coffin, C. (2012). Dynamic assessment, tutor mediation and academic writing development. Assessing Writing, 17(1), 55-70. doi:10.1016/j.asw.2011.11.003