Common Standards for K-12 Education? Considering the Evidence: Summary of a Workshop Series (2008) / Chapter Skim
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4 Analyzing Quality and Impact
4 Analyzing Quality and Impact
Pages 31-38
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From page 31... ...
Karen Wixson presented an overview of the rating schemes that have been used by four national organizations -- Achieve, Inc., the American Federation of Teachers, Education Week, the and Fordham Foundation -- to evaluate the quality of state content standards. She found that, overall, the groups each included some, but not all, of the following evaluation criteria: • Specificity, • Clarity, • Subject and grade coverage, • Coverage of subject-specific topics, • Rigor/demand of topics, • Balance of knowledge and skills, • Teaching approaches, and • Policy and practice changes to implement standards.
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From page 32... ...
Discipline experts are often involved when standards are developed, and many such groups have produced cogent descriptions of the ways learning develops within academic disciplines, as well as of the key concepts in each discipline that students need to master as they progress. Drawing on research on learning and cognition as well as on content expertise, these descriptions emphasize the integration of learning and understanding and the ways that factual learning, conceptual Research in mathematics and science education, in particular, has yielded advances in the understanding of how students learn complex content and of the corresponding "content pedagogy" -- that is, understanding of complex content integrated with understanding of how best to teach it -- that teachers need (see National Research Council, 2001, 2006)
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From page 33... ...
Teachers must have what is called pedagogical content knowledge, and this has been defined for various fields, in order to foster this kind of learning in their students, but the importance of this preparation is easily overlooked if the learning progressions are not described in the state standards. In practice, Wixson observed, it is the standards for elementary and middle school students that are the least likely to reflect more sophisticated conceptions of learning in the disciplines, yet students will need that type of preparation in order to succeed with the challenging coursework encouraged in high school by many states, such as the advanced placement or international baccalaureate programs.
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From page 34... ...
This information does not directly answer, however, the broader questions of what real impact that variation has had on teaching and learning, and what benefits a set of common standards that was widely adopted might bring. Douglas Harris explored possible ways to investigate these questions empirically. He began by considering the possibility that common standards might have the effect of improving education by: • roviding better instructional coordination across schools and p grade levels; • llowing students to experience higher level academic content; a • ddressing inequities, since disadvantaged students are more likely a to be offered lower level content; • roviding concrete, more conceptually based guidance to teachers; p and • mproving fairness and the effectiveness of federal and state i accountability.
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From page 35... ...
One would be to review the effects of standards on intermediate outcomes, such as instruction and the enacted curriculum, teacher preparation, professional development, textbook design and adoption, or changes in the way schools are administered. Finding out, for example, whether teachers are aware of the specifics of revised standards and report that they attempt to apply them, or whether changes in textbook content or teacher professional development align with revised standards, would reveal important effects (or noneffects)
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From page 36... ...
For example, it is possible that the reduction in flexibility that may come with new standards could discourage teachers who are already effective, or it could discourage desirable prospective teachers. His primary message was that the understanding of the effects of standards needed to support sound policy decisions must be pieced together from imperfect sources of evidence -- and that empirical evidence alone may not be sufficient to answer the policy question of what benefits common standards might bring.
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From page 37... ...
Wise found a modest correlation between the percentage of students who were proficient on the state's assessment and their performance on NAEP, but he also found that "if a state had a high percent of students scoring at the proficient level, it's almost sure that they set a very low cut point." The bottom line, however, was that Wise found no statistically significant relationship between states' proficiency cut scores and their students' gains on NAEP across the two periods he examined. His initial conclusion was that other factors, such as coherent content standards and the quality of curriculum and instruction, may be more important than where the proficiency cut scores are set.
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