TEI Samples

Discovery Education values the use of digital opportunities for evaluating student understandings that are embedded within and supportive of instruction. Discovery Education has developed multiple technology enhanced item types (TEIs) for use in instruction, as well as in more formal assessments. These TEIs are developed through templates that require authoring attention to three distinct features:

Evidence statement

Instructional feedback

Scoring expectations

Each item is authored in response to specified and documented evidence statements that clearly articulate what concept is targeted by the item and observable and measurable evidence of student understanding in line with the targeted construct.

For each item, authors have developed specific instructional feedback according to potential and probable student responses, including misconceptions indicative of student misunderstandings. Because the feedback is related to student understanding of the targeted concept defined in the evidence statements, students are given more meaningful feedback than only positive or negative reinforcement statements. In addition, the students receive instructional guidance that is specific to each of their attempts, scaffolding the expectations commensurate with their level of understanding and capitalizing on the learning moment. The feedback feature can be enabled for instruction and disabled for assessment purposes.

Driven by the evidence statements, authors provide scoring rules according to distinct levels of performance expectations, resulting in meaningful and instructionally helpful differences between scores. These scoring rules are automatically applied to both binary (right/wrong) and partially scored responses.