Dynamic assessment of morphological awareness and third-grade literacy success

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine a dynamic assessment with graduated prompts to assess morphological awareness and determine whether such a task was related to third-grade literacy success. Method: A dynamic assessment of morphological awareness was adapted and administered to 54 third-grade students in addition to a norm-referenced language and literacy battery. Results: A dynamic assessment of morphological awareness measured a range of performance including that of emerging morphological awareness abilities and provided rich linguistic insights for how best to scaffold and prompt for such a skill. In addition, the dynamic morphological awareness measure was found to be significantly related to, and to contribute unique variance to, reading comprehension abilities. Conclusions: These results suggest that morphological awareness is an important factor to consider when addressing students’ literacy performance in early elementary school and that dynamic assessment appears to be a clinically valuable tool when examining early morphological awareness abilities.