State and National Education Standards Alignment and Correlation Services

Standards—statements of what students should know and be able to do—have become a common fixture in the education landscape. Though the standards movement can no longer be considered new, the aspects that relate to the work of stakeholders across the country are constantly changing. Fortunately, a good foundation exists. Collections of knowledgeable professionals from both education and industry have at least reached some consensus at the national level as to what understandings and ways of thinking are most important in certain fields of study.

Your materials should reflect that consensus.

Unfortunately, most don't. And with many of those that do, those connections are not clearly stated, easy to find, and easy to use. With new requirements for statewide assessment sweeping the nation, and the stipulation that these assessments rest on and align with state content standards and student achievement standards, the bar is raised even before we've cleared the hurdle at the lower levels. As a product developer and provider, you play a role in meeting the challenge. There is a direct connection between the materials your organization provides to educators and the increase in the capacity of the educational system to promote student learning. Capacity, as identified by Massell (1998), refers to the "wherewithal needed to translate high standards and incentives into effective instruction and strong student performance." She goes further to indicate that at the classroom level for teachers and students, the individual capacities for learning are mediated by the availability of (largely unavailable) appropriate curriculum materials.

Designed Instruction provides services to assist developers in articulating connections of their products to education standards (correlation), and in transforming and restructuring materials and approaches (alignment) so that they promote standards and best practice. We work with standards in each core academic area—mathematics, science, language arts/reading, and social studies/history—in each state in the U.S., as well as with the voluntary national documents. Intimate familiarity with each document, what the standards statements really mean with regard to student learning, and tested processes for analyzing and determining where and how standards are addressed, ensures the highest levels of accuracy at the most economical rates possible. Total costs for correlation and/or alignment services depend on the complexity of the product being correlated and the number of standards documents to which the product is correlated. For more information regarding these services, or to obtain a custom quote, contact us.

Make your decisions... informed decisions. Get more information about standards.

Read the Exploratory Report Education Standards 2004

Download the following print-optimized resources:

Exploratory Report NCLB: Standards and Assessment (PDF - 152 K)

White Paper Making Standards Alignment a Value-Add: From the Product Developer's Lens... (PDF - 832 K)

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Massell, D. (1998). State strategies for building local capacity: Addressing the needs of standards-based reform. CPRE Policy Briefs, No. RB-25. Philadelphia, PA: Consortium for Policy Research in Education, University of Pennsylvania.

National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. (2000). Principles and standards for school mathematics. Reston, VA: NCTM.

National Research Council. (1996). National science education standards. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.