Gender Differences in the Effect of Dynamic Assessment on Grammatical Accuracy of Writings

Abstract

One of Vygotsky's contributions to education was the emergence and development of dynamic assessment which stresses the need for unifying assessment and instruction. This research was an attempt to investigate whether there is difference between female and male EFL learners regarding the effect of dynamic assessment on grammatical accuracy of their writings or not. To this end sixty five male and female pre-intermediate Iranian EFL were randomly assigned into two groups namely control and experimental. After the pre-test of grammatical accuracy in essays, eight session mediations were implemented for experimental groups; however, for the control group no mediation of examiner was provided. The interventionist sandwich format of dynamic assessment was applied followed by the post-test. Both control and experimental groups were implemented the same the pretest and posttest in a non-dynamic way. The data obtained from both pretest and post-test were statistically analyzed through running independent-samples t-test. The results indicated that there is no difference between females and males regarding the effect of dynamic assessment on grammatical accuracy their writings. These findings can have pedagogical implications for language teachers, teacher educators, test developers, and syllabus designers.