As parents or caregivers, you have probably heard much about education "standards". But what exactly are standards and what do they mean for your children's learning? Understanding the role that standards play in your child's education can help you to figure out whether your child is receiving the quality science education all students deserve.
About standards
Academic content standards (also known as benchmarks or learning goals) are criteria that serve as a basis for deciding what to teach and for measuring student knowledge of a subject or idea at a particular grade level. Every state has its own set of standards, as do some school districts.
There are also national standards for some subjects, including science. Since standards specify what students should learn, they help to define
what (though not necessarily how) teachers should teach through a grade- and subject-appropriate curriculum in a consistent manner.
What Does a Standard Look Like?
A standard spells out the knowledge or skills students should have in a particular area. For example, a standard related to understanding the universe could be: "By the end of the 2nd grade, students should know that there are more stars in the sky than anyone can easily count, but they are not scattered evenly, and they are not all the same in brightness or color."
Increasingly building on this knowledge, a related, later standard would be:
"By the end of the 12th grade, students should know that the stars differ from each other in size, temperature, and age, but they appear to be made up of the same elements found on earth and behave according to the same physical principles."
Who sets the standards?
These examples above are taken from Benchmarks for Science Literacy published by Project 2061 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the first set of national science standards created. The National Research Council has also published a set of learning goals in science, known as the National Science Education Standards These two sets of national standards were developed by experts in the fields of science and education, and many states have based their own standards based on either or both these publications. Other states and local communities, however, have also developed their own standards.
The role that tests play
Once a state or district has adopted a set of learning goals, standardized testing is used to measure student knowledge. While academic standards define the "what" (the knowledge or skills necessary); testing measures the "how well" (the knowledge or skills attained). But testing mechanisms vary greatly. Some school districts create their own tests, while others purchase tests from private companies, and then adapt them to fit their standards. The important thing to ensure accurate, fair, quality testing is to ensure that the tests are “aligned’ to the learning goals – that is, that the learning goals (what students are expected to know), the curriculum (what students are actually taught) and the assessments (what students are tested on, or the tests) are related and not focusing on completely different goals.
What you can do
To fully understand what your child is expected to learn in school and what the science education goals are, you can acquaint yourself with your state's standards: what they are, how they were designed or what they were based on, and how they're being implemented in your child's classroom.
Interested in more? Check out these additional resources!
