Theo Dawson | Marc Schwartz | Zachary Stein | Kurt Fischer
Theo Linda Dawson, Ph.D.
Founder and president of the Developmental Testing Service and founder of the DiscoTest initiative.
Dr. Dawson is an award-winning scholar, researcher, educator, and test developer. She has been studying how people learn and how people think about learning for almost two decades. Her dissertation, which explored the way people of different ages conceptualize education, learning, testing, and teaching introduced a new set of methods for documenting learning sequences. This work, along with her studies in psychometrics, have provided the basis for a new model of assessment—one that focuses on helping teachers identify the learning needs of individual students.
Through the DiscoTest initiative, Dawson and her colleagues are demonstrating that it is possible to design standardized educational assessments that not only help teachers identify the learning needs of individual students, but turn the testing experience into a learning experience in which students practice their thinking, communication, and evaluation skills.
Scholarly articles by Dawson can be found on the articles page of the DTS site. You can find essays related to testing on her blog.
