Educational Standards: Overview
As noted in the project requirements and the Design Guide, one of your first design decision is narrowing your lesson’s focus and scope to the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS). We will now spend some time reviewing these educational standards.
What are educational standards, and why are they important?
Educational standards are simply learning goals. They set a benchmark for what skills and knowledge a learners should possess at a given grade (or learning) level. When we designed this course, we surveyed subject matter experts (SMEs) in adult education about where we should focus our instructional design service efforts to support the need for adult basic education. It is common on a large instructional design project to work with SMEs familiar with the subject matter. The adult education SMEs recommended that we focus on designing and developing instructional materials for adult education that align with the U.S. College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) for Adult Education.
In this section of the course, we will review two relevant sets of educational standards that you will be working with on your instructional design project:
- The College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) for Adult Education, and
- The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on which the CCRS are based.
College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS)
The College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) were released in 2013 by the U.S. Department of Education Office of Vocational and Adult Education. as a guide for adult education programs that prepare learners for post-secondary college and career training. The CCRS focus on English Language Arts / Literacy and Math subjects, and are the standards that underlie the primary high school equivalency exams and other adult basic education programs in the U.S.
The CCRS outline what adult learners should know and be able to do in Mathematics and English Language Arts and Literacy. The CCRS act as guideposts in Adult Education, and are meant to be used as a tool to focus on what skills and knowledge adult learners should possess. These educational standards assist programs with Adult Education curriculum development, guide instructors, and provide learning goals for basic skills instruction and critical thinking skills to prepare learners for high school equivalency exams, postsecondary education, and employment.
Download Your CCRS Copy
Since we will be referring to the College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) report throughout the course, we have added a PDF copy of the document within the Files folder in the left navigation menu that appears on each page of this course, as shown in the figure below. We will review the standards in detail later within this module, but please take a few minutes to find and download your copy of the CCRS report.
Common Core State Standards (CCSS)
The College and Career Readiness Standards (CCRS) are based on the U.S. Common Core State Standards (CCSS) designed for K12 education. The Common Core State Standards initiative began in 2009 as a state-led effort to develop education standards for English Language Arts and Literacy in History, Social Studies, Science, and Technical subjects and Mathematics to ensure students in K12 schools were “graduating high school prepared for college, career, and life.” As of today, 42 states and the District of Columbia have adopted the CCSS. As a brief overview of the CCSS for K12 education, please take a moment to watch the following video (3:10 minutes):
[INSERT VIDEO PICTURE AND LINK]
Source: Three-Minute Video Explaining the Common Core State Standards (Links to an external site.) from CGCS Video Maker on Vimeo (Links to an external site.).