Introducing Disco—A testing revolution

Disco is a radical new assessment system for classroom teachers that nurtures children's inborn love of learning, improves teachers' domain and developmental knowledge, increases time for teacher-student interactions, and provides researchers with the data they need to understand how students learn subject matter and reasoning skills.

Go to the Disco site.

Download our brochure.

 

Disco takes testing to a new level.

1. Disco tests are delivered online (currently for grades 7+).

2. Disco automates many aspects of grading and reporting.

3. Teachers' understanding of student development grows with ongoing exposure to Disco tests, enhancing their ability to support student learning.

4. Because all Disco tests require students to show how they are thinking by writing a series of short essays, they directly conribute to improvements in writing and reasoning.

5. Disco automatically produces detailed reports for teachers, parents, and students.

6. Disco reports reward student learning by showing students what they have learned and what they can benefit from learning next.

7. Disco can deliver coded cross-sectional and longitudinal data to educational researchers, adding to our understanding of student learning.

Go to the Disco site.

Disco tests are delivered and scored online (Currently for grades 7+. Ask us about alternatives for younger students or students with special needs). Tests and scoring interfaces are very easy to navigate, requiring no special computer skills.

Disco tests are made up of two or more types of assessments. They always have an essay section and sometimes have a multiple choice section or other types of questions, including surveys.

Student performances are evaluated in two ways:

• multiple choice or survey questions are auto-scored with a key;

• essays are coded for strengths and weaknesses by teachers, using drop-down lists based on detailed rubrics (designed by researchers, and other domain experts, including teachers). Rubrics can focus on any important aspect of performance, and assessments can contain more than one type of rubric.

As teachers code the essays written by students, they can make suggestions for new codes. These are examined by domain experts (including classroom teachers) and may be included in future drop down lists. In the coding interface, teachers can add personal comments for the individual student, his or her parents, or personal use.

Disco automatically produces customizable reports for students, parents, and teachers containing detailed information about student performance, including what students show they have learned (content knowledge), the level at which student understand what has been learned (developmental level), details about what this means, and recommendations for learning. Reports may also include a personal discograph™ portraying a student's developmental progress (in a given subject area) over time.

Because Disco can deliver coded cross-sectional and longitudinal data to researchers, the results of Disco tests can be used by researchers to increase our knowledge about how students learn particular subjects, knowledge that can help educators improve curricula.

Go to the Disco site.