The "2003 National Science Teachers Association Standards for Science Teacher Preparation" (NSTA-SSTP) were developed to provide guidelines and expectations for science teacher preparation programs. This article is the second in a special "JSTE" series on accreditation written to assist science teacher educators in meeting the "NSTA-SSTP" and to…

Professional teaching associations in Australia and abroad have been developing teacher and/or teaching standards and associated professional learning and assessment models in the key discipline areas since the 1990s. In Australia, a specific intent of this approach is to capture and recognise the depth and range of accomplished educators'…

This digest presents eight questions that pertain to how standards-based education affects classroom instruction and assessment at the local level. Various options and recommendations are provided to help education officials determine the practical concerns of standards-based education. The following questions are explored: (1) where will the…

What does it mean to "develop professional standards"? This paper argues that the task is one of setting up the processes and resources that will bring about an informed and growing teaching community. This is not a task in making lists of the "competencies" that teachers are to be measured against. Considerable work by…

Stresses key areas of political conflict in the certification of a national curricular content and explores trade-offs a national-standards approval group must make. The article analyzes left-wing support for explicit opportunity-to-learn standards and right-wing objections to educational outcomes and focuses on initial approval stages, not…

The most important issue in education today is helping students reach high standards. These standards are changing American education from a system driven by inputs and regulations to one judged by results. This manual is intended for use with any set of standards. Followed step by step, it will take the teacher from the abstract statements of the…

Norms govern the criteria by which students decide what is good and what is not good, and align their learning trajectories accordingly.We found that the high-school students' norm is to produce working, but not necessarily error-free, programs and to argue for their correctness solely on the basis of a few executions. Therefore, they prefer…

Reviews efforts to develop national content standards for teaching English. Today's standards movements are distinguished from earlier efforts in that the learner is recognized as active, the meaning is socially and historically contingent, and the purpose is the development of language for political power and the creation and appreciation of…