According to the Georgia Performance Standards (GPS) website:
The performance standards provide clear expectations for instruction, assessment, and student work. They define the level of work that demonstrates achievement of the standards, enabling a teacher to know “how good is good enough.” The performance standards isolate and identify the skills needed to use the knowledge and skills to problem-solve, reason, communicate, and make connections with other information. They also tell the teacher how to assess the extent to which the student knows the material or can manipulate and apply the information.
What does this mean?
Basically, I would define the standards as a list of the subject matter and skills that each student should master after completion of an academic course. These lists, different for each academic subject and grade, were composed by a team of professors, teachers, administrators, parents, and students. They are constantly tweaked and updated. The standards, at least for a subject like social studies, are not an exhaustive list of names and dates to memorize. The standards are more thematically-focused. For example, the World History standard concerning the American and French Revolutions do not say that "students shall know that Louis XVI was the King of France between 1769 and 1793,", or that "students shall memorize the date of the Stamp Act." Rather, it says that students shall "analyze the causes and effects of revolution(s) in England, America, France, Haiti, and Latin America."
Thus, standards are an attempt to codify what is important for each student to know. These things include identification of certain people, places, and events, reading comprehension, writing proficiency, map skills, chart/graph skills, and higher order thinking skills such analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The standards are considered so important that administrators in a standards-based school expect their teachers to reference the standards during the course of a lesson a minimum of three times, in order to effectively establish the "expectation" in the minds of the students of what they should be learning.
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| Venn Diagram where a student could compare and contrast the causes and effects of the major revolutions between 1689-1789. |
Thus, standards are an attempt to codify what is important for each student to know. These things include identification of certain people, places, and events, reading comprehension, writing proficiency, map skills, chart/graph skills, and higher order thinking skills such analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The standards are considered so important that administrators in a standards-based school expect their teachers to reference the standards during the course of a lesson a minimum of three times, in order to effectively establish the "expectation" in the minds of the students of what they should be learning.
That, my friends, is my humble attempt at describing the standards. For those wanting to learn more (and I encourage you to do so), please review the following links from the official website for the Georgia Performance Standards. First, I have included the page targeted specifically to parents. Second, I have linked to the GPS for our 10th grade world history class.
*Note: See link on the sidebar of the home page for Q&A discussion of the Georgia Performance Standards.
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