Getting to Know the ASN: A Bird’s Eye View

In the mid-1990s, standards-based education in the U.S. was enacted under the Clinton administration, and further refined under President George W. Bush. The legislation sought to improve American student performance by instituting more rigorous testing, and by holding schools accountable for student performance on these tests. However, since each state had its own process for creating and implementing educational standards, the content that students were expected to learn in one state was sometimes vastly different from the expectations in another state.

As a result, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) initiative was developed in order to ensure that all American students learn a common core of knowledge that will prepare them to enter higher education or the workplace with sufficient knowledge and skills to be successful. To date, 45 states have adopted the CCSS, and are currently in various stages of implementation.

JES & Co., the parent organization of the Gateway, has developed the Achievement Standards Network (ASN) in order to vastly simplify the location of, and correlation between, educational standards on the state, national, and international levels. The ASN houses over 400,000 educational standards, and new standards are added daily. The standards are entered into a metadata framework and are freely available in machine-readable format, which allows users to easily access, retrieve, and draw relationships between standards. Thus, the ASN can be used in many ways by different user communities. For example, teachers and librarians can use the ASN in order to locate lesson plans or activities that address a specific educational competency or set of standards. School administrators can use it to map their state standards to those of another state, or even another country – extremely helpful for placing relocated students (nationally or internationally) at the proper grade/competency level. Publishers can use the ASN to map their content to specific state standards, or even break down existing standards to create their own more granular statements for use in their textbooks. Professional organizations and corporations, such as the American Association of School Librarians (AASL) and Cisco, for example, use the ASN to describe competencies and note achievement standards for use in their lesson plans or certification programs, respectively. Other options currently under development include the ability to track student performance, the option for students to view and comment on specific learning objectives tied to their curriculum in a meaningful way, and – what really floats my librarian boat – embedded linked data that can dramatically enhance learning materials in a dynamic fashion. I’ll be exploring these capabilities much more fully in future columns, and specifically address how teachers, librarians, and other educators can use the ASN to locate educational resources. Lots of good stuff coming up, so watch this space!

Starting this month, the Joann’s Picks and Peggy’s Corner columns will appear monthly instead of weekly on the Gateway. As always, we’ll be highlighting K-12 lesson plans, activities, and other resources every day throughout the week on our Twitter and Facebook pages, so be sure to check those pages often.