Going beyond One-to-One Mediation in Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD): Concurrent and Cumulative Group Dynamic Assessment

Abstract

This paper reports on a study delving into the efficiency of two types of Group-Dynamic Assessment (G- DA, concurrent and cumulative) in teaching English articles. To this aim, two intact classes of third- grade high school students were included in the study and randomly assigned to Cumulative G-DA (n= 34) and Concurrent G-DA (n= 33) groups. The homogeneity of the classes was determined and their knowledge of articles, prior to and after the treatment, was measured by administering two parallel cloze tests. G-DA sessions lasted for three sessions, during which both groups worked on three editing tasks on articles according to the operational definitions proposed by Poehner (2009) for G-DA procedures. Results of the study revealed that both types of G-DA increased gains in learning articles. Additionally, it came to light that the concurrent group outperformed the cumulative one. The results are discussed in the light of the tenets of sociocultural theory.