David Tzuriel, Ph.D.
David Tzuriel, Ph.D., is a clinical and educational psychologist and an expert on dynamic assessment (DA) of learning potential and mediated learning experience. He received his Ph.D. (Clinical Psychology) from Peabody College of Vanderbilt University in 1977 and currently serves as a Professor Emeritus at Bar Ilan University (Israel) and Talpiot Academic College. In the past, he served as chair of the School of Education (2003–2007), the Special Education Program, and the Doctoral Program. He also served as President (1999–2001) of the International Association for Cognitive Education and Psychology (IACEP) and as Editor of the Journal of Cognitive Education and Psychology (JCEP) from 2006 to 2011.
David Tzuriel published many studies on DA and mediated learning experience (MLE), including five books (e.g., Interactive Assessment with Carl Haywood, Dynamic Assessment of Young Children, La Valutazione Dinamica delle Abilità Cognitive, in Italian). His scientific work concerns the empirical validation and implementation of Vygotsky's and Feuerstein's Structural Cognitive Modifiability and Mediated Learning Experience theories.
David Tzuriel has published nine DA instruments mainly for children, which are used all over the world: (a) Children's Analogical Thinking Modifiability (CATM); (b) Children's Inferential Thinking Modifiability (CITM); (c) Cognitive Modifiability Battery (CMB): Assessment and Intervention; (d) Children's Seriational Thinking Modifiability (CSTM); (e) Seria-Think Instrument; (f) Children's Conceptual and Perceptual Analogical Modifiability (CCPAM); (g) The Analogical Modifiability Puzzle Test; (h) The Windows Mental Rotation – Dynamic Assessment (WMR-DA); (i) The Mental Rotation 3 Dimensions (MR3D) Test.
David Tzuriel is known worldwide as a leader and developer of the DA movement. He has taught 180 international workshops around the world (North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America) over the last 40 years, including workshops at the American Psychological Association and UNICEF-sponsored workshops in South America.
Areas of interest include mediated learning experience strategies in mother-child and siblings interactions, mediated learning as a developmental determinant of cognitive modifiability, the role of peer-mediation for enhancement of teaching style, and the use of DA as a substitute for standardized conventional psychometric tests, development of learning and thinking skills by cognitive education programs, gender differences in spatial ability skills, executive functions (EFs), spatial orientation, and prediction of academic skills by analogical reasoning and EFs. At Bar Ilan University, David Tzuriel supervised 98 MA and Ph.D. dissertations, most of which are related to DA and MLE. His scientific work focuses on the empirical validation, implementation, and modification of the cognitive modifiability paradigms, and his research is frequently cited in the literature.
What is Dynamic Assessment?
Dynamic Assessment (DA) refers to an assessment, by an active teaching process, of a child's perception, learning, thinking, and problem solving. The process is aimed at modifying an individual's cognitive functioning and observing subsequent changes in learning and problem-solving patterns within the testing situation.
What information do we get from DA?
DA can provide accurate information about the individual's learning ability, specific deficient cognitive functions, change processes, and mediation strategies that are responsible for cognitive modifiability or learning-how-to-learn. DA was found to be a much better predictor of children's future educational performance than static test scores. Research findings support the conception of DA as an effective approach for revealing a "hidden" intellectual potential of special-needs students.
Criticism of standardized tests
- They are biased toward minority groups and children with special needs and do not reflect their true ability.
- They are characterized many times by selective administration procedures and selective interpretation of results among high-risk children.
- Motivational, emotional, and personality factors are not well taken — unlike in DA, which is a holistic approach.
- There is a lack of information on learning processes and metacognitive factors affecting academic success.
- Very frequently static tests provide inadequate recommendations on specific remediation processes, intervention strategies, and prescriptive teaching.
Goals of DA
- Examine the capacity of the child to grasp the principle underlying an initial problem and solve it correctly.
- Assess specific deficient cognitive functions (e.g., impulsivity, lack of systematic exploratory behavior) and adequate cognitive functions responsible for the child's failures and successes.
- Examine the nature and amount of investment required to teach the child a given principle or modify a deficient cognitive function.
- Examine the extent to which the newly acquired principle is successfully applied in progressively more complex problems (transfer of learning).
- Examine the child's differential preference for one or another modality of problem presentation (pictorial, linguistic, numerical).
- Examine the differential effects of different training strategies given to the child.