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 (GDA,concurrent and cumulative) in teaching English articles. To this aim, two intact classes of thirdgradehigh 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 theirknowledge of articles, prior to and after the treatment, was measured by administering two parallel clozetests. G-DA sessions lasted for three sessions, during which both groups worked on three editing tasks onarticles according to the operational definitions proposed by Poehner (2009) for G-DA procedures. Resultsof the study revealed that both types of G-DA increased gains in learning articles. Additionally, it cameto light that the concurrent group outperformed the cumulative one. The results are discussed in the light of the tenets of sociocultural theory