Standards for Student Learning - Definitions and Descriptions, Historical Context, Comparing Past and Present, Potential for

Success
Standards, as they are used in education, are verbal statements of goals or desired classes of outcomes. They describe what the goals of the system are. Standards-based educational reform has the intention of having most or all students reach identified standards and of organizing educational services, including teacher preparation and instructional interventions, to address such standards. The rhetorical linchpin of such a system is the standards themselves. Definitions and Descriptions Standards differ according to function and have fallen into at least three overlapping classifications. Content standards are intended to describe domain-specific topics, for example, student performance in areas of mathematics, such as measurement or probability, or in physics, such as force and motion. National professional groups, such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Historical Association, for example, have reached professional consensus about such standards. States have also put into place panels intended to recommend such standards for adoption to their state boards of education. School districts may choose to augment, focus, or redefine content standards adopted by their state. Content standards are often arrayed in a continuum of development, specifying, for instance, particular standards for eighth-grade students or for beginning readers or those standards thought to be necessary to meet high school graduation requirements. Skill standards are explications of either a fundamental skill, such as reading, or job-performance standards, such as the ability to work in teams. Skill standards are often, although not always, independent of a particular content domain. Performance standards, unfortunately, is a term used to denote two very different concepts, and users often fail to be explicit about their interpretation. Some educators use performance standards as a means to describe the "what" of education further or to give examples of tasks that fit particular content standards. Performance standards of this type are intended to communicate more clearly the intention of general content or skill standards. Good performance standards should link up to the design of assessments intended to measure the standards, although they are usually at some distance from that process. For example, the content standard "to understand the causes of major historical events in American history" might be illustrated by a description that says "The student will be given primary source documents related to an important historical era, such as the American Revolution or the Great Depression, and be asked to identify alternative explanations for the causes offered by different historical writers." The student will evaluate these arguments and use source material to explain in an essay which perspectives are most reasonable. These performance standards might then be augmented with a sample task and scoring scheme for a set of such essays. The second type of performance standard delimits the degree of proficiency, or the "how much" part, of performance. These performance standards are invoked following the development of assessments designed or selected to measure student performance of the standards. Frequently, these performance standards are described in terms intended to give a rough scale of competence, such as basic, proficient, or advanced. The operational definition of these standards is usually based on a cutscore the dividing score between classificationsfor example, "above 75 points." The underlying theory of standards-based reform is that it is criterion referenced. This means that performance of the system is judged in the light of attainment of the standards as measured by particular tests and assessments. Because the inferences drawn about educational improvement strongly depend on the validity of these achievement levels, or performance standards, they are of critical importance. Historical Context

In the United States the 1990s were the decade of educational policy on standards and assessments. Following on the educational reforms in Great Britain in the late 1980s, the movement in the United States was propelled by a connected and unprecedented set of events: the meeting of state governors at Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1989 establishing national educational goals; the release that same year of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics standards, describing expectations for an integrated and applied form of mathematics learning; the 1992 report of the deliberations of the National Council on Education Standards and Testing; and the enactment of the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994, tying compensatory education resources to evaluations of progress toward standards. The focus on educational standards as the basis for targeting and evaluating student learning seems the product of the 1990s but has, in fact, a venerable educational history. To understand the idea of standards for student learning, it is instructive to consider how the concepts of standards and assessments developed. The conception of standards and assessments can be traced to the 1951 writings of Ralph W. Tyler on curriculum and instruction in the "garden-variety schools." Tyler constructed the problem of improving education with admirable logic. In his view, schools should organize themselves as entities seeking to produce learning and achievement. Outcome measures of learning and achievement should be considered the proximal ends of education. These ends, in order to be pursued in a reasonable way, required deliberate decisions made by educators and other interested parties. Tyler addressed the task of determining educational objectives in a systematic way. He described three potential sources for generating learning objectives: the subject matter discipline, the society, and the needs of learners. Because this process was sure to generate too many objectives, candidate objectives were to be filtered by using screens of two types. The first screen was the psychology of learning, to answer through the application of theory and empirical knowledge the question of feasibility. The set was to be winnowed by the question "Can the objectives be taught and learned?" The second screen to reduce and make coherent standards was to articulate and apply a simple but integrated philosophy of education. This philosophical screen was to answer questions of priority and coherence as well as value: "What goals are important and matter most?" The remainder of Tyler's argument, called his rationale, focused on a systematic plan for teaching and learning and addressed criteria for the selection of learning opportunities, the creation of measures of achievement and other outcomes to match the objectives, and ways to involve feedback to improve the quality of education over time. Although there was considerable excess in the 1960s and 1970s in the focus on operational, behaviorally oriented objectives, there was some evidence that the system worked. The Tyler rationale was an object of study in the 1960s and the 1970s but is no longer in the working memory of many educators, who believe that the standards-based reform movement is a newly minted concept and revolutionary in its systemic focus. Comparing Past and Present Academic disciplines. Two principal sources provided standards in the 1990s. The first was the academic disciplines, led by professional organizations, such as the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 1989, the joint effort of the International Reading Association/National Council of Teachers of English in 1994, the Mathematical Sciences Education Board of the National Research Council in 1995, and the National Council of Teachers of English in 1996. These groups either took on or were assigned the leadership position on the generation of standards (goals) for schools in their subject matters. The overwhelming use of this source made great sense because the rhetoric around standards pointed to the use of "new and challenging" standards intended to support the learning of all children. In the public's mind, challenging standards equaled academic-or discipline-based learning. The experts, as they had in the curriculum reforms in the late 1960s and 1970s, once again weighed in on what students should learn in school. Perhaps in response to behaviorism in goal statements, these statements of standards are often global and subject to multiple interpretations.

Society. The second source for the generation of standards was the society. This source was narrowed to standards that were regarded as important in the workplace. Reports of needed skills from the state of Michigan, from national research studies, from analyses of labor markets, and from the work of the U.S. Department of Labor Secretary's Commission on Achieving Necessary Skills devoted attention to requirements for success in employment. The argument for these sets of skills was tied to the importance of U.S. economic competition, and the sense, at the beginning of the 1990s, that the United States might be permanently eclipsed on the one hand by the economic dynamos in the Far East and on the other by the power of the emerging European community. This specter was bolstered by the reports of international comparisons of educational achievement showing that U.S. student performance was far lower than had been imagined and hovered in the not-so-good to truly miserable ranges. Consequently, societal sources of objectives took on four different varieties. The first was a set of new tasks, heretofore not emphasized in the academic side of schools; a good example was teamwork. In teamwork the emphasis was on roles and functions of team members rather than on "spirit." Second were fundamental skills, such as reading and computation, skills lacking in entry-level employees. Third, there was a new emphasis on applied problem solving, both the inventive type and the application or modifications of algorithms necessary for key procedures. The fourth category of standards was in the general affective area and involved responsibility, leadership, and service orientation. For the most part, these four strands of tasks were not reconciled. Students' needs. A third source of Tyler's goals, the student's individual needs, found its way into standards through the focus on cognitive psychology, where the fundamentals of reading comprehension or mathematics problem solving, or the explanation of subject-matter content, and meta-cognition emphasized cognitive processes needed to display deep understanding. The promise of this approach was increased transfer. Such approaches often targeted integrative or project learning, but usually without addressing the transfer issue. For the most part, however, this source of objectives played out more directly in the application of the psychology screen and in the construction of assessments. Changing expectations. A cynic might argue that the entire reform is explained by the psychological measure of paired associates, and that all that has been done is to substitute the term standards for goals and objectives, and the softer sounding assessment for the term test. Yet, the expectations for education have changed dramatically from the 1930s and 1940s. Education has become regarded as a right by society for a far greater proportion of learners than ever before. Society has changed scale and comprises greater numbers of individuals with different cultural, language, and economic backgrounds. Many differ substantially in their views of their own goals and prospects, the degree to which they embrace traditional American values, and the value they place on alternative ways to attain their own goals. It is clear that development of educational systems does not happen linearly on a cycle that supports achieving high levels of quality in one component (standards, for example) before attacking the next (e.g., the development of instruction). Paradoxically, it is probably best to act as if a logical, step-by-step process could guide the decisions about present or future practice, or at least as if superimposing a staged process were important. Without a framework as a guide for actions and understanding, it is difficult to think about such a complex system, in which institutions and organizations must respond to market pressures, to teacher-capacity variations, to economic shifts, technical advances, and the competitive strut of contending policy perspectives. Potential for Success Will these standards work to improve education? Standards will be useful as a communication device to rally educators and the public. The system will fail programmatically and substantively, however, unless serious effort is taken to connect measures systematically to the standards, to set realistic priorities about what standards can be achieved (as opposed to the enormous numbers typically adopted by states and localities), and to emphasize the essential acts of teaching and learning in the system. Arbitrary standards for achievement are set, and are used to judge a school or system and to assign sanctions based on putative standards-based performance. This strategy attempts to assign

uniformity to schools and systems that are inherently different in governance, in capacity, and in development. For the system to succeed in the context of democratic educational institutions, policymakers will need to take steps to assure that growth in performance on measures is attributable to teaching and learning rather than to practices intended simply to raise test scores artificially. They will need to understand more systematically and procedurally what they mean when they claim a system is "aligned," and they will need to address forthrightly what requirements there may be to ensure the rising performance of all students.

Read more: Standards for Student Learning - Definitions and Descriptions, Historical Context, Comparing Past and Present, Potential for Success - National, Education, Performance, and Council StateUniversity.com http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2444/Standards-StudentLearning.html#ixzz2gNPEgNMC

Science Learning - Knowledge Organization And Understanding, Standards, Tools - EXPLANATION AND ARGUMENTATION
EXPLANATION AND ARGUMENTATION The K12 U.S. science education standards, now published state by state, without exception cite competence in scientific investigation as an important curriculum goal from the early grades on. Students, it is claimed, should be able to formulate a question, design an investigation, analyze data, and draw conclusions. Reference to such skills in fact appears in discussions of curriculum objectives extending well beyond the discipline of science. The following description, for example, comes not from science education literature but from a description of language arts goals specified by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE): "Students conduct research on issues and interests by generating ideas and questions, and by posing problems. They gather, evaluate, and synthesize data from a variety of sources to communicate their discoveries in ways that suit their purpose and audience" (NCTE and International Reading Association website). It is important that the cognitive skills involved in such activities be defined in a clear and rigorous enough way to make it possible to specify how they develop and how this development is best supported educationally. At the same time, to make the case that scientific thinking is a critical educational objective, it must be defined more broadly than "what professional scientists do." Scientific thinking is essential to science but not specific to it. But are not children naturally inquisitive, it may be asked, observant and sensitive to the intricacies of the world around them and eager to discover more? Do inquiry skills really need to be developed? The image of the inquisitive preschool child, eager and energetic in her exploration of a world full of surprises, is a compelling one. But the image fades as the child grows older, most often becoming unrecognizable by middle childhood and certainly by adolescence. What happens to the "natural" inquisitiveness of early childhood? The answer is that it needs to be channeled into the development of the cognitive skills that make for effective inquiry. More needs to be done than keeping alive a "natural curiosity." The natural curiosity that infants and children show about the world around them needs to be enriched and directed by the tools of scientific thought. Coordination of Theories and Evidence

One way to conceptualize these scientific thinking skills is as skills in the coordination of theories and evidence. Even very young children construct theories to help them make sense of the world, and they revise these theories in the face of new evidence. But they do so without awareness. Scientific thinking, in contrast, involves theintentional coordination of theories with new evidence. Another way to define scientific thinking, then, is as intentional knowledge seeking. Scientific thinkers intentionally seek evidence that will bear on their theories. Defined in this way, the developmental origins of scientific thinking lie in awareness of knowledge states as generating from human minds. Awareness of the possibility of false belief is thus a prerequisite to scientific thinking. If knowledge states are fallible, one's own knowledge may warrant revision in the face of new evidence. Regarded in this way, scientific thinking is more closely aligned with argument than with experiment and needs to be distinguished from scientific under-standing (of any particular content). Scientific thinking is something one does, whereas scientific understanding is something one has. When conditions are favorable, the process of scientific thinking may lead to scientific understanding as its product. Indeed, it is the desire for scientific understandingfor explanationthat drives the process of scientific thinking. Enhanced understandings of scientific phenomena are certainly a goal of science education. But it is the capacity to advance these understandings that is reflected in scientific thinking. Scientific thinking requires that evidence be represented in its own right, distinct from the theory, and that the implications of the evidence for the theory be contemplated. Although older children, adolescents, and even adults continue to have trouble in this respect, young children are especially insensitive to the distinction between theory and evidence when they are asked to justify simple knowledge claims. Note that the outcome of the theory-evidence coordination process remains open. It is not necessary that the theory be revised in light of the evidence, nor certainly that theory be ignored in favor of evidence, which is a misunderstanding of what is meant by theory-evidence coordination. The criterion is only that the evidence be represented in its own right and its implications for the theory contemplated. Skilled scientific thinking always entails the coordination of theories and evidence, but coordination cannot occur unless the two are encoded and represented as distinguishable entities. The following six criteria for genuine scientific thinking as a process (in contrast to scientific understanding as a knowledge state) can be stipulated: 1. One's existing understanding (theory) is represented as an object of cognition. 2. An intention exists to examine and potentially advance this understanding. 3. The theory's possible falsehood and susceptibility to revision is recognized. 4. Evidence as a source of potential support (or nonsupport) for a theory is recognized. 5. Evidence is encoded and represented distinct from the theory. 6. Implications of the evidence for the theory are identified (relations between the two are constructed).

The Epistemology of Scientific Learning There is more to scientific thinking that needs to develop, however, than a set of procedures or strategies for coordinating theories with evidence. As hinted earlier, at its core this development is epistemological in nature, having to do with how one understands the nature of knowledge and knowing. An until recently largely neglected literature on the development of epistemological understanding shows a progression from an absolutist belief in knowledge as certain and disagreements resolvable by recourse to fact, to the multiplist's equation of knowledge with subjective opinion. Only at a final, evaluativist level is uncertainty acknowledged without foregoing the potential for evaluation of claims in a framework of alternatives and evidence. If facts can be readily ascertained with certainty, as the absolutist understands, or if all claims are equally valid, as the multiplist understands, scientific inquiry has little purpose. There is little incentive to expend the intellectual effort it entails. Epistemological understanding thus informs intellectual values and hence influences the meta-level disposition (as opposed to the competence) to engage in scientific thinking. Similarly, a strategic meta-level that manages strategy selection can be proposed. This metastrategic level entails explicit awareness of not so much what to do as why to do itthe understanding of why one strategy is the most effective strategy to achieve one's goals and why others are inferior. It is this meta-strategic understanding that governs whether an appropriate inquiry or inference strategy is actually applied when the occasion calls for it.

Read more: Science Learning - Knowledge Organization And Understanding, Standards, Tools EXPLANATION AND ARGUMENTATION - Scientific, Thinking, Evidence, and Theory StateUniversity.com http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2407/ScienceLearning.html#ixzz2gNPqYFpa The phases of scientific thinking themselvesinquiry, analysis, inference, and argumentrequire that the process of theory-evidence coordination become explicit and intentional, in contrast to the implicit theory revision that occurs without awareness as young children's understandings come into contact with new evidence. Despite its popularity in educational circles, once one looks below the surface of inquiry learning, it is less than obvious what cognitive processes are entailed. Research suggests that children lack a mental model of multivariable causality that most inquiry learning assumes. They are not consistent over time in their causal attributions, attributing an outcome first to one factor and later to another, and infrequently do they see two factors as combining additively (much less interactively) to produce an outcome. A mature mental model of causality in which effects combine additively to produce an outcome is critical to adoption of the task goal of identifying effects of individual factors and to the use of the controlled comparison strategy (which has been the focus of research on scientific reasoning) to achieve that goal. If a single (not necessarily consistent) factor is responsible for any outcome (as reflected in the inferential reasoning of many young adolescents), what need is there to worry about controlling for the effects of other factors?

If it is this total structure (including meta-strategic, meta-cognitive, and epistemological understanding, as well as values) that needs to develop, where do educators start? They probably need to begin at multiple entry points. Opportunities should be plentiful for the frequent and regular exercise of skills of inquiry, analysis, inference, and argument, thereby enabling these skills to be practiced, elaborated, consolidated, and perfected. At the same time, meta-level awareness and understanding of skills should be promoted by helping students to reflect on what and particularly how they know and what they are doing as they acquire new knowledge. The two endeavors reinforce one another: understanding informs practice and practice enhances understanding. The Social Context Equally critical is the social context in which all of this needs to take place, the often neglected dispositional side of knowing. Educators want children to become skilled scientific thinkers because they believe that these skills will equip them for productive adult lives. But it is not enough that these adults believe it. If children are to invest the sustained effort that is required to develop and practice intellectual skills, they too must believe that learning and knowing are worthwhile. These values and beliefs can develop only through sustained participation in what Ann Brown in 1997 called a "community of learners." Here, scientific thinking skills stand the best chance of developing because they are needed and practiced and socially valued. Returning scientific thinking to its real-life social context is one approach to strengthening the metalevel components of scientific thinking. When students find themselves having to justify claims and strategies to one another, normally implicit meta-level cognitive processes become externalized, making them more available. Social scaffolding (supporting), then, may assist less able collaborators to monitor and manage strategic operations in a way that they cannot yet do alone. A number of authors have addressed scientific thinking as a form of discourse. This is of course the richest and most authentic context in which to examine scientific thinking, as long as the mistake is not made of regarding these discourse forms as exclusive to science. Scientific discourse asks, most importantly, "How do you know?" or "What is the support for your statement?" When children participate in discourse that poses these questions, they acquire the skills and values that lead them to pose the same questions to themselves. Although central to science, this critical development extends far beyond the borders of traditional scientific disciplines.

Read more: Science Learning - Knowledge Organization And Understanding, Standards, Tools EXPLANATION AND ARGUMENTATION - Scientific, Thinking, Evidence, and Theory StateUniversity.com http://education.stateuniversity.com/pages/2407/ScienceLearning.html#ixzz2gNPuR8dQ