DISCOVERING HIDDEN ABILITIES (DHA): BUILDING ASSESSMENT TOOLS FOR CHILDREN WITH ATYPICAL DEVELOPMENT.

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Research question: What are the abilities of children with typical and atypical development thatemerge in naturalistic interactions and how can these inform the development of alternativeassessment frameworks?Background and rationale for the study:Assessments are a constant presence in the life of children with atypical development (AD), withconsequences in terms of provision of support, inclusion in mainstream schools, and evaluation oftheir developmental progress. However, many limitations of standardised assessments have beenrepeatedly pointed out, crucially the fact that by definition they cannot take into account atypicalchildren's different approaches to problem solving, language and communication. Naturalisticstudies of children's conduct on the other hand, provide compelling evidence of spontaneouslyoccurring linguistic, cognitive and social abilities through enriched, multimodal analyses of activitiesin-context. These studies propose an alternative approach to conceptualising competences and skills.The PhD project will be devoted to identifying enabling practices used by caregivers and children'sindicators of abilities occurring in everyday adult-child interactions and define principles which couldbe used to develop new instruments complementing and supporting the work of practitioners. Theproject will use a converging methods approach combining multiple research methods, such ascorpus analysis of existing and new data capturing interactions of both typically and atypicallydeveloping children, a survey identifying practitioners' problems with existing assessments, and willuse the data obtained to develop guidelines for an alternative assessment framework.