About Educational Standards in TeachEngineering

• Physics - Students will use scientific skills and processes to explain the interactions of matter and energy and the energy transformations that occur (K-8)
  • Mechanics (K-8)
    • Explain that there must be a cause for changes in the motion of an object (K-K)
      • Observe and describe the ways in which a variety of objects' motion can be changed. (K-K)
        • Go faster
        • Go slower
        • Slow down to a stop
        • Speed up from a stand still
        • No change
        • Change direction

      • Compare the different ways objects move.
        • Etc.
        • Etc.

      • Etc.

Hence, the standards in the ASN form one giant tree of a finely-branched network of progressively detailed standards.

Furthermore, in the ASN tree of standards, each segment of a branch represents an individual standard! For instance, in the Maryland example above; "Go faster," "Go slower," "Mechanics (K-8) and "Explain that there must be a cause for changes in the motion of an object (K-K)" are all separate standards. Obviously, this convention might or might not correspond well with the educational practice of your state or school district. Therefore, we provide two tools for exploring and navigating ASN standards in TeachEngineering:

• The standards browsing tool lets you explore the standards hierarchy in detail. You start from the top (state, subject and year) and from there explore the standards in detail


• The standards search tool lets you key in on standards through a word search.

Standard-Curriculum Alignment

Finding curriculum that can support the delivery of a standard or learning outcome in classroom settings is difficult and time consuming. To support this task we have pre-aligned all curricular materials in TeachEngineering with educational standards. Several sources of information for this alignment are being used:

• Explicit alignments are those that were made manually by the curriculum developers when they submitted it to TeachEngineering.  Since developers usually align their curriculum only to their home state's standards, few of these alignments are available, but because they are done manually they tend to be quite reliable.
• So-called CAT alignments are done automatically by a software application developed at Syracuse University's Natural Language Processing Center (www.cnlp.org). Because of automation, this program can do a lot (!) more alignments than a curriculum developer, but they might not be as reliable.
• SAT alignments are based on similarity between standards. These similarities—also computed by a software application developed at Syracuse University's Natural Language Processing Center (www.cnlp.org)—can be used to infer the alignment of documents to a standard via that document's alignment with similar standards. As is the case with all automated alignment tools, SAT alignments are more plentiful than manual ones, but not as reliable.

We realize that all of this gets complex; over 100,000 math and science standards, 50 states, different grades and different sources for standard-curriculum alignment. We have done our best to provide tools that help you navigate this complex standard landscape. We do, however, realize that better solutions always exist, so please do not hesitate to help us improve.