Abstract: To understand children’s cognitive development, there is an increasing need for developing and validating assessment and diagnostic methods in both research and education practices. The conventional static tests focus on a particular state of ability development, rather than children’s potential ability. Building on Vygotsky’s concept of “Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD)”, dynamic testing has the potential to detect latent capacity of development, thus providing a way to more comprehensively assess children’s cognitive capacity. Most of dynamic tests were usually adaptations of classical intelligence test tasks, exploring children’s latent capacity by dynamic assessment method. So, the purpose of the current study was to develop and standardize a new dynamic test based on conservation and relation domain assessment adapted from the Inventory of Piaget’s Developmental Tasks (IPDT), and to examine the validity of this new dynamic test with a sample of children with relatively low academic achievement.
To validate the new dynamic test, fifty-four eight or nine years old children were randomly selected from the third grade in two public elementary schools. The dynamic testing involved four stages: pretest, intervention, modifiable, and posttest; each with a different set of testing questions. In accordance with their test performance, the participants also received six different levels of clues, developed based on theories of cognitive development as well as prior dynamic tests in other domains. The results showed that with the incremental steps of intervention in response children’s performance, their performance gradually improved, providing some initial evidence for the validity of this new test.
The validated dynamic test was first administered to two groups of eight and nine years old children: the experimental group (n = 35) children with relatively lower academic achievement, and the control group (n = 33) with relatively moderate levels of academic achievement. The results of the 2 × 2 ANOVAs with the pretest scores revealed significant main effect of group (F(1, 64) = 80.28, p < 0.01), suggesting that the low achieving group had lower pretest scores than the moderate achieving group. The results of the ANCOVAs with the posttest scores, which controlled for the pretest scores, found no main effect of group (F(1, 64) = 1.89, p > 0.05). However, it required more intervention steps for the low achieving group gain similar performance to the moderating achieving group. The results of the ANOVAs with the transfer scores identified a significant interaction between group and children’s (F(1, 64) = 4.84, p < 0.05). The follow-up simple effect tests showed that the near transfer scores for eight but not nine years old children from the low achieving group were higher than the scores for the moderating achieving group. There was no main effect of group for the far transfer scores (F(1, 64) = 0.03, p > 0.05), suggesting that the low achieving children did not necessarily perform worse in new task domains than the moderating achieving children. Furthermore, Regression analysis found that children’s ability acquisition variable from dynamic testing had a significant predictive effect on their academic achievement.
Taken together, two conclusions can be drawn based on our findings. First, the current study provided initial evidence for the validity of revised IPDT-conservation and relation domain tests, suggesting that (1) the dynamic test has the potential to more comprehensively assess latent cognitive capacity in children with relatively low academic achievement, and (2) the dynamic test may be similarly applied in other domains of IPDT. Second, despite their relatively inferior performance in current capacity tests, children with lower academic achievement, may not differ from children with relatively higher academic achievement in latent capacity, suggesting the potential to improve these children’s performance using appropriate intervention and training.

Key words: dynamic testing, the Inventory of Piaget’s Developmental Task (IPDT), the zone of proximal development (ZPD), children with low academic achievement