Next Generation Standards Alignment of Digital Education Resources
The State Educational Technology Directors Association (SETDA) launched a project in June 2012 in partnership with PARCC and the Smarter Balanced Assessment Consortium – and in collaboration with the Council of Chief State School Officers – to design and implement an approach to digitally encode the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) to meet both the consortia’s and K-12 field’s needs for high-quality alignment of instruction, assessment, and professional learning resources. The technical design aspect of the project is now complete and the products of the effort have been incorporated into the ongoing work of PARCC and Smarter Balanced. Given that this work is of ongoing interest to state and district education leaders, publishers, software developers and educators, SETDA published the GIM-CCSS technical design documents under an open license to allow re-use and further development. SETDA believes that the technical approach is broadly applicable to any academic content standard and would offer important advantages today to those who choose to deploy it.
This collection of documents on the SETDA Web site provides an open-source launching point technical guidance and specifications to create a common approach to digitally encoding the Common Core State Standards (CCSS). The final reports are written for technical experts in this field (not novices), offering a mechanism for addressing inter-state variations in CCSS adoption. It should be noted that, due to the evolving needs of the consortia and substantial disagreements among academic content standards experts advising the project about how to encode the CCSS, the deployment of the solution was deferred to allow each consortium to resolve disagreements about that encoding consistent with their respective specifications. More information on the project is available at http://assess4ed.net/wiki/gim-ccss-project-and-related-resources.