The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) has released technical documentation to assist state and district education leaders, publishers, and educational software developers with ensuring high-quality alignment of digital K-12 education resources to academic content standards, such as the Common Core State Standards (CCSS).
State-adopted academic content standards set forth expectations for what students should know and be able to do in core academic subjects and serve as the foundation for assessment development, instructional materials adoption, teacher professional development, and curriculum implementation in K-12 education. Despite the critical importance of standards alignment of education resources to school reform and improvement efforts and repeated calls for greater attention to that process, there remain significant challenges to the rigor, transparency, and usefulness of most current approaches to standards alignment.
“The shift to greater use of digital resources in education provides an important opportunity to address longstanding frustrations with the quality of standards alignment in education,” said Douglas Levin, SETDA executive director. “In adopting standards for what students should know and be able to do, states should further require that information on the alignment of education resources to those standards be rigorous, transparent, useful, and freely available to educators and the public.”
The resources released by SETDA provide recommendations for how the CCSS could be digitally encoded to support the transparent high-quality alignment of education resources to those standards, including an approach to encoding state-adopted extensions of the CCSS. While focused on the CCSS, the proposed approach is broadly applicable to the digital encoding of any learning standard.
To access the released technical documentation, please visit: setda.org/web/guest/Interoperability
Source: State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA), www.setda.org