What Does “Standards-Based” Mean?

Question: Over the past several years, the term “standards” has seemed to crop up everywhere. People refer to standards-based assessment, standards-based classrooms, even standards-based professional development. Could you please explain what all this means?

Answer: To understand these various standards-based activities, it is important to consider two types of standards: content and performance standards. In the most general sense, content standards are the set of skills and knowledge that states have determined their students should possess as they move up through the public education system. The 1994 reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) mandated that all states adopt rigorous standards. The No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act of 2001 mandated that states not only develop what the ESEA refers to as “academic content standards” but also regularly assess students relative to the standards and hold schools accountable for students’ achievement of the standards. As a result, standards are very important in our public schools.

States and, in some cases, districts have used various methods to create their standards. The number of content areas for which standards have been developed and students are assessed also differs. Moreover, the rigor of the standards varies greatly across the country. Regardless of these differences, standards provide a foundation on which districts and schools create curriculum and instruction. The first step in the process is the creation of grade-level expectations, which are based on—but are more specific than—academic content standards and actually guide curriculum and instruction decisions.

Thus, what teachers ultimately do in the classroom should reflect their state’s academic content standards. Standards-based assessments are based on these same academic content standards. In other words, these assessments are designed to measure students’ achievement of the standards from which their classroom instruction is derived. From this perspective, in standards-based classrooms, teachers really are not “teaching to the test.” Rather, instruction and assessment are founded on the same set of content standards.

As you might expect, standards-based professional development focuses on the process of incorporating content standards into the classroom, through curriculum, instruction, and classroom assessment. It also provides support by helping teachers to evaluate student work in relation to standards and helping to develop educators’ skills in using assessment results to improve curriculum, instruction and, ultimately, student learning.

In today’s high-stakes accountability environment, performance standards play a particularly important role. Performance standards pertain to “how well” students are to perform in demonstrations of their achievement of content standards. States often produce narrative descriptions of different levels of student work quality. Cut-scores on tests are minimum scores required of students for them to be categorized as “proficient” or perhaps “advanced.” The term “performance standards” is sometimes used to refer to the narrative descriptions of proficiency, as well as to a minimum test score for proficient students. Percentages of students performing at the various levels are the focus of school reports for the accountability testing mandated by NCLB. These statistics are quite different from traditional, average scaled scores or median percentile ranks.