Silver Spring, Md. (March 5, 2009) – Discovery Education introduces its newest service empowering educators to improve student achievement, Progress Zone. The first formative assessment service enabling educators to monitor student academic progress through teacher-created diagnostic tests linked to state curriculum/assessment standards, Progress Zone helps educators use assessment results to prescribe digital media for individualized instruction.

Progress Zone is a user-friendly service that allows educators to quickly create, share and administer custom academic probes using a bank of more than 35,000 unique assessment items. All items are tightly aligned to state standards with skill/sub-skill definitions. The Progress Zone item bank contains reading, math, science, and U.S. history questions for grades 1-12.

After students take the assessments, administrators can utilize detailed reports to summarize and analyze generated data. From this data, educators can evaluate a student’s performance on a particular skill, monitor improvement over time and adjust classroom instruction to meet the needs of individual learners.

By analyzing student performance on the assessments, Progress Zone recommends engaging digital content that can help students in need of additional instructional support. Utilizing media from Discovery Education streaming, the digital video-based learning resource scientifically proven to increase academic achievement, Progress Zone provides direct access to digital content aligned to state standards that can immediately impact achievement. Valuable classroom instruction time is saved as Progress Zone automatically identifies remedial content in the form of videos clips aligned to curriculum /assessment standards.

When complemented by Discovery Education’s suite of assessment services, including Predictive Benchmarks and Response-to-Intervention, Progress Zone provides schools with a balanced, comprehensive solution unlike any other service available.

According to Hardin Daniel, Discovery Education’s Vice President of Educational Assessment, “Discovery Education Progress Zone empowers teachers to impact student achievement through the use of research-based tools that monitor what students are learning, identify concepts that may need additional attention, and provide digital media that helps educators improve student understanding through the power of visual learning. We are looking forward to working closely with educators in our joint mission to improve student achievement.”

More Information

For more information on Discovery Education Progress Zone, Discovery Education streaming or any other products and services from Discovery Education, please visit Discovery Education or call 800-323-9084.

About Discovery Education

Discovery Communications (NASDAQ: DISAD, DISBD, DISCK) revolutionized television with the Discovery Channel and is now transforming classrooms through Discovery Education. Powered by the number one non-fiction media company in the world, Discovery Education combines scientifically proven, standards-based digital media and a dynamic user community in order to empower teachers to improve student achievement. Already, more than half of U.S. schools access Discovery Education digital services. Explore the future of education at www.discoveryeducation.com.

Contacts

Discovery Communications
Stephen Wakefield
240-662-2893
stephen_wakefield at discovery dot com
www.discoverycommunications.com

C. Blohm & Associates, Inc.
Sandy Fash
608-839-9800
sandy at cblohm dot com
www.cblohm.com

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