ACADEMIC RESEARCH

You can find sample reports from some of our previous projects on our articles page.

Also, check out our information page about DiscoTest, our new classroom assessment system. Your research may help us design another free developmental assessment for public school teachers and their students.

DISCO, our radical alternative to conventional assessment, is a FREE assessment system for public school teachers that's intended to nurture children's inborn love of learning, improve teachers' domain and developmental knowledge, increase time for teacher-student interactions, and provide researchers with the data we need to understand how students learn subject matter and reasoning skills. To learn more about Disco™, click here.

Our approach to developmental assessment is grounded in the theories of Baldwin, Piaget, and Fischer. Our methods build directly on the work of Fischer and Commons and taps the same dimension identified by Armon, Kitchener & King, Perry, Selman, and several other developmentalists.

We reliably and accurately assess the developmental level of verbal and written arguments, using one of two scoring systems. For smaller projects, data are scored by Certified Analysts with the Lectical™ Assessment System (LAS). For large-scale projects, we also use our computerized assessment system, Lectica®.

The LAS is a well-validated developmental assessment system that targets the level of hierarchical complexity of texts. To do this, we examine the logical structure of the text and its level of abstraction. We have shown that the LAS behaves like a developmental "ruler" that allows us to score texts from many knowledge domains, placing performances on the same developmental scale.

Lectica®, our electronic scoring system, is based on some of the same principles employed by LAS analysts. After being calibrated on a large enough database, it is as reliable as the LAS and has the additional advantage of being a truly objective assessment.

Dr. Dawson originally designed the LAS to use as part of a methodology for describing the pathways through which people construct concepts. Several of these sequences have been described in articles or reports and on the Lectica web site.

After collecting high quality data, Certified Lectical Analysts score each performance for its developmental level, while trained coders exhaustively document their conceptual content. After both analyses have been completed, our analysts examine the relation between texts' developmental levels and their conceptual content, gradually (re)constructing descriptions of conceptualizations at each level.

To describe pathways, it is necessary to gather samples of reasoning from people representing a large age-range (preferably about age 5 up to the age level of the targeted population). This may seem counter-intuitive, but without understanding how conceptions develop from childhood, we can't do a good job describing the lower levels identified in the target population. This is the reason that many domain specific developmental scoring systems designed for adolescent and adult applications suffer from poorly specified lower levels.

We use what we discover about learning pathways to evaluate the effectiveness of developmental curricula. During the last few years, we've evaluated a number of curricula, including curricula focused on critical thinking, decision making, physical science, and educational psychology. To do so, we embed developmental assessments at strategic time-points during and after the delivery of a given curriculum. These assessments are designed to be useful both to instructors and researchers. They can also be employed to provide students with high quality feedback on their learning.

We score and analyze the content of assessment results using the same methodology employed to describe learning sequences. Reports include information about changes in what and how students think at different time points. These accounts are detailed enough to inform curricular improvement.

As far as we know, we are the only providers of program evaluations who include detailed accounts of student learning with our evaluations. You can download some of our evaluation reports on the articles page.

We we conduct both qualitative and quantitative analyses of developmental data. Although we prefer to analyze data we have collected (quality control), we occasionally contract to analyze high quality data collected by other researchers.

We have described our approach to the qualitative analysis of text on the Lectica web site. We also conduct conventional statistical analyses like ANOVA and regression analysis, and employ Rasch modeling and HLM to examine learning trajectories.

We offer a 20% discount on all research conducted for academics who join us as research partners.

What is a research partnership?

If you are planning a research project that involves learning or cognitive development, and your research interests overlap with ours, we may be interested in working with you as research partners, contributing to research design, data collection, analysis, and publications. If so, we will not only offer a discount on our services, but we may be able to donate time for proposal development.

We are particularly interested in projects that will contribute to the design of new DiscoTests.

Contact Dr. Dawson if you would like to explore the possibilities.

If you are interested any of our services, would like to follow up on a special offer, or would like more information, email us anytime.

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