Standards, Curricular

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 national standards as a guide in developing their own state standards. These state standards go by different names such as Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills (TEKS), Arkansas Curriculum Frameworks, California Content Standards, and New York Curriculum Standards. Whatever the name, they are state cur-ricular standards.

In recent history, the curricular standards came to the forefront as a response to the 1983 report, A Nation at Risk. In the report, the U.S. educational system was decried as overall a mediocre system, and a call was issued to improve the quality of U.S. education. Curricular standards were examined and revised to reflect high expectations of academic achievement for U.S. students. Also central to this reform movement was the emphasis on assessment. By tying assessment to curriculum standards and using the assessment results for school ratings, cur-ricular standards reached an importance never attained previously. Although curricular standards existed before 1983 and professional organizations and researchers attended to these standards, the standards were not embraced by the school practitioner until school ratings were based on student achievement on assessments based on these standards. The Goals 2000 issued in 1990 further elevated the importance of curricular standards because they called for all students in 4th, 8th, and 12th grades to leave school having shown mastery of rigorous academic standards. Professional organizations responded with revised standards, and public schools wrote curricula based on these stringent standards. Four major content areas with national curricular standards are science, mathematics, English language arts, and social studies. The National Science Teachers Association, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Council for Social Studies have developed standards in their content areas.

Most practitioners recognize curricular standards as goals of a discipline that students are expected to master whether a process, skill, or understanding. This definition looks to schools to achieve these standards with student outcomes. However, some professional organizations such as the National Council of the Teachers of Mathematics include vision in their standards.

The current importance of curricular standards is apparent when examining state level student academic achievement tests mandated by the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB). Each state develops its annual achievement tests for third through 8th graders and high schoolers by testing students on the curricular standards for reading, language arts, mathematics, science, and English proficiency at the appropriate grade level. States issue grades to students, schools, and school districtsbased performance on the curricular standards, and the grades are made public. Some states require students to demonstrate mastery of these curricular standards through the state assessment before the student is promoted to the next grade level or is allowed to graduate from high school.

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