Dynamic Assessment of Reading Test (DART)

• Dates: 2018–21
• Funding body: Nuffield Foundation
• Value: £332,043
• Primary investigator: Hannah Nash (Psychology)
• Co-investigators: Paula Clarke (Education); Anna Weighall (University of Sheffield, Education); Anna Gellert (University of Copenhagen, Linguistics)
• Language at Leeds satellites: Language Development and Cognition
• Language at Leeds themes: Language and Cognition

We know that 25% of children leave primary school unable to read well and we need to identify these children early. Children starting primary school come from a range of home backgrounds but current screening tests focus on existing knowledge, which is influenced by experience. We propose an alternative; dynamic tasks measure the ability to learn and so could be more accurate screeners – differentiating children with underlying learning disorders from children who have not had sufficient experience to learn. We are undertaking the first large scale study of dynamic assessment of three components of reading (decoding, orthographic learning and vocabulary) in a UK context.