ENPAIR 2025

Diagnostics are crucial in individualised education planning. However, transferring diagnostic information to educational practice seems to be challenging (Bosma & Resing, 2008; Pameijer, 2006). In educational contexts various diagnostic approaches are used. Here, traditional test-approaches are repeatedly criticised for failing to provide sufficient information for individualised education planning (Pameijer, 2006). Dynamic testing is discussed as an alternative (Börnert & Wilbert, 2016), but it’s still rarely used in practice. Possible reasons might include teachers’ negative opinions regarding dynamic testing or difficulties with interpreting its results. Research indicates that teachers find information from dynamic tests as useful as information from traditional diagnostic tests (e.g., diagnosis of a child) whereas norm-referenced test results (e.g., comparison to peers) are being seen as less helpful for individualised education planning (Bosma et al., 2012; Bosma & Resing, 2010). At the same time, dynamic testing seems to be less familiar to teachers than other diagnostic approaches (Freeman & Miller, 2001). However, previous research had methodological limitations such as only using vignettes of dynamic testing without comparison to other approaches to examine the usefulness or solely relying on descriptive statistics. Therefore, this study investigates preservice teachers’ preference for different diagnostic approaches with comparing vignettes containing different test results (norm-referenced, criterion-referenced and variations of dynamic testing) in an online study. Additionally, possible moderating variables such as attitude towards diagnostics were analysed. During the presentation, initial results of the study will be presented.

Keywords: Dynamic Testing, individualised education planning, diagnostics