As educators define the term, content area standards are general statements regarding:

• Module
• Challenge
• Initial Thoughts
• Perspectives & Resources
• Wrap Up
• Assessment

How will Ms. Begay know she is teaching her students everything they need to learn this year?

There are two types of standards: content and performance (achievement). Content standards create a clear outline of the essential knowledge, skills, and understanding that students need to master in a given content area. Content standards refer to what gets taught in specific content areas (e.g., reading, language arts, mathematics, science, history). They define the breadth and depth of knowledge, skills, and processes that are to be taught within a given domain. Because states and school districts are striving to increase student performance, educational professionals and other stakeholders in the community include challenging and rigorous content in the development of standards.

All states have developed content standards in at least the areas of reading/ language arts, math, and science. Most states have developed content standards in other areas as well, including art, health, technology, and career education. However, only the academic areas are assessed using large-scale tests.

Listen as Diane Torres-Velásquez talks about children being active participants in their learning (time: 1:15).

Diane Torres-Velásquez, PhD
Associate Professor, Special Education Department
University of New Mexico

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Transcript: Diane Torres-Velásquez, PhD

Mathematics is really looking at the world around us and making sense of it. And so, as we’re looking at this type of perception of mathematics, then it’s really important for us to understand that it’s much more than just learning to add and subtract and multiply and divide just by learning the steps. We’re looking at mathematics in a way that involves children at a much deeper level and where children are participating. They’re active participants in their learning and their experience of mathematics, and so when we look at the verbs as we’re planning mathematics instruction, when we’re looking at the verbs of what it is to do mathematics, we are looking at words like explore, solve, justify, develop, words that are action words and not just the directional words that we use to associate with arithmetic. So mathematics, when we look at the standards, the five goals that were set forth by the NCTM standards, were to first of all to learn to value mathematics, to become confident in ability to do mathematics, to become mathematical problem solvers, to learn to communicate mathematics, and to reason mathematically.

Performance Standards

Next, state (and district-level) assessments are used to measure student achievement of the content standards. Today’s assessments also measure the application of knowledge and skills and guide how teachers should teach the content. School personnel must be able to identify when student performance meets the standards and when it does not. School personnel can analyze the performance results of individual classrooms in order to identify teachers who need to adapt their instructional methods of teaching.

Which of the following statements is most accurate about a typical five year old child understanding of numbers and or counting?

Which one of the following statements most accurately describes the nature of knowledge transforming in a child's writing group of answer choices?