Curricular standards are the student learning goals for a particular curriculum content area with designations for specific grade levels. Standards typically include intended learning outcomes in the areas of knowledge, skills, and understandings of basic concepts, along with structure of the discipline. Students are expected to demonstrate mastery of these standards primarily through performance on assessments. National professional organizations of teachers and teacher educators generate these standards, which often are grouped according to broad concepts such as “number sense.”

Although curricular standards are set by national professional education associations, each state has developed its own set of learning goals for its students by content area and grade level. Because of the existence of national standards, most states' standards are remarkably similar because the states use the ...