Static tests are used in everyday educational and psychological practice, to obtain an indication of a child’s ability to learn. These tests, however, do not provide information on why a child fails to learn adequately, or what type of help would benefit this child and enable him or her to profit fully from education. With the introduction of inclusive education, the need of the educational field may have shifted from classification, to information about the needs in order to make inclusion possible. Process-oriented measurement could be a valuable addition to the existing tests.

Where traditional tests are concerned with the product a child can deliver when solving problems within certain domains, process-oriented dynamic testing focuses on the processes of both problem solving and the learning processes involved in these problems. To this end, strategy use and performance are investigated, both during testing phases where the child is asked to solve certain problems, and during training phases where the child is provided with hints to enable him or her to learn how to effectively solve the problem.

Despite its advantages, process-oriented dynamic testing currently holds some painful disadvantages. The time-consuming nature of both the testing process and the analysis of the data make it impractical to use, as well as the subjectivity of identifying components of the problem solving process. We expect that these disadvantages can be eliminated through the use of electronic testing methods and computerized data analysis. Electronic tangibles, tangible materials which can physically be manipulated and are equipped with electronic sensors, provide a helpful platform to elicit relatively natural problem solving behaviour from the child, but also obtain computerized measures to help quantify the process of problem solving.

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