STATE, NATIONAL, AND INTERNATIONAL STANDARDS

STANDARDS-BASED EDUCATION

State, National, and International Standards

Standards-Based Education

State, National, and International Standards

Standards-Based Education

Introduction

Standards are a latest occurrence in education, with most of them having been evolved inside the past 15 years. In 2002, Kimberly Tanner and Deborah Allen published in the first capacity of Cell Biology Education (CBE) an important article about national science education standards for Grades K-12. That article probable supplied for many readers of CBE their first glimpse of the standards action in K-12 education and the potential impact of standards on higher education. The article focused on the two national science standards documents, Benchmarks for Science Literacy, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Science Education Standards, published by the National Research Council, and what those standards specify about what students should understand and be able to manage at various grade levels in cell biology. Tanner and Allen (2002) also supplied what have turned out to be some prescient ideas and questions about the more general roles of science standards in education in the United States.



State

The notion of standards-based instruction makes sense to me, as it apparently does to most administrators and consultants. However, a latest survey (Barnes, 2002) discovered that a national sample of fourth and eighth grade teachers "do not accept the premises" of standards-based education (Finn, 2002). The teachers said they considered schools should be child-centered rather than teacher-centered and that learning to learn was more important than specific facts and skills.This actually may contemplate the ambiguity of "standards-based." Although every individual undoubtedly agrees that teachers should be clear about their purposes and that their practices should be consistent with those purposes, they may not agree what the purposes (standards) should be.

To many politicians and members of the public, "standards-based" means simply that students are needed to rendezvous "rigorous" standards. So they applaud familiar practices that blend testing and grading: teach a large body of content, give a test that samples the content, and set an arbitrary "cut score" that determines who will pass and who will fail.The difficulty with this version of standards is that short tests composed of mostly multiple-choice items cannot adequately assess a large number of convoluted standards, so it obscures the very idea of standards-based instruction. The difficulty is increasing worse because, with falling revenues, states that had some extended-response items (which are expensive to score) can no longer ...