About the ASN in General
The Achievement Standards Network (ASN) is designed to provide text
book publishers, educational program developers and assessment
specialists with economical access to the authoritative,
machine-addressable electronic collection of state and national
academic standards and benchmarks.
The overarching goals of the ASN are to provide assistance to the classroom teacher in the alignment of instructional resources and assessment instruments with controlling content standards. It is clear that the social and political thrust behind the U.S. national move toward accountability in K-12 education (and now beyond into higher education) has roots in our notion of standards-based systems of teaching and learning. Fundamental to this notion are “guiding questions” (Gaddy, Dean & Kendall, 2002):
- What knowledge and skills will students be learning?
- What evidence will be gathered and used to ensure that students learn?
- What experiences will be used to ensure that students learn?
The ASN project is currently focused sharply on the third question identified by Gaddy, Dean and Kendall by providing the national infrastructure necessary to make it possible to associate certain aspects of the learning experience in the form of educational resources (learning objects, lesson plans, activities, assessment instruments etc.) to the formal assertions identified through answers to question one—state and national content standards?
The following figure illustrates the nature of the problem ASN addresses and its goals. Mis-alignment among the three resources and processes denoted in the figure contributes to the array of issues that have placed education in the U.S. at risk and threatens the validity of systems of accountability.
The ASN is reaching its goals by providing the core infrastructure necessary through: (1) the ACSR's content of over 445 machine-addressable current and historical U.S. K-12 content standards; (2) the Common Intermediary Statements (CIS) intermediary; (3) Web Service interfaces to its services and resources; and (4) a framework for multi-faceted research into comparative standards and the correlation of standards to measurable learning outcomes.
ASN Components
ASN History
The ASN Academic Content Standards Repository (ACSR) data store had its partial origins in the Align to Achieve (A2A) state database. Under funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), the A2A database of state standards was reconceptualized based on the ASN Entity-Rrelationship Model and encoded in Resource Description Framework (RDF) for use in the context of the Semantic Web prior to A2A ceasing to do business. In addition to the re-encoding of the A2A data, substantial work was done revisiting the original standards documents in order to refine the initial A2A data. Over the period of the NSF grant, many new state standards from across the K-12 curriculum were added to the ACSR.
PRAXIS pressure?
