Theo Dawson

Theo Linda Dawson is the president & CEO of the Developmental Testing Service, LLC, which provides on-line developmental assessments, curriculum design, and program evaluations to governments, consultants, educational institutions, clinicians, and academics. She practiced midwifery in the Toronto area in the 70s and 80s, then co-founded and operated an advertising agency in Los Angeles until the early 90s, when she left the business to attend graduate school at UC Berkeley. There, in 1998, she received her Ph.D. in Human Development (with a minor in psychometrics).

In 1999, she received the American Psychological Association's Division 7 Outstanding Dissertation Award for "A good education is: A lifespan investigation of evaluative reasoning about good education". In 2002, she completed a 4-year project, funded by the Spencer Foundation, in which she developed a computerized method for determining the developmental level of texts, currently in the patent process. She has taught at UC Berkeley, Harvard, and Hampshire College.

One of Theo's primary professional objectives has been to devise a high quality and universally applicable measure of cognitive development. Her scoring system, the LecticalTM Assessment System (LAS), which builds on the work of Kurt Fischer and Michael Commons, is the product of 14 years of research and rigorous testing. This work is widely published and available through her web site.

Since 2002, Theo has been working with a federal agency to map the development of leadership skills in federal managers and employ this knowledge to design developmentally informed leadership standards and curricula. She became interested in Jaques' work in 2005, when she was designing a course on leadership for her students, and has since learned enough to see strong parallels between her work and RO.