Standards2030 is a new vision of science standards. It is my intent and hope that Standards2030 will become the next US K-12 science standards.
The contents and capabilities of Standards2030 are described below.
Standards 2030 represents knowledge with two dimensions, Statements and Actions. Statements and Actions combine to form Learning Goals.
Statements represent declarative knowledge—facts and concepts that students come to know. They either describe the natural world or are definitions useful in describing the natural world. Standards2030’s practice is to write statements at the smallest feasible grain size, to maximize their descriptive ability and flexibility. Statements can be added, edited, and removed.
Actions represent procedural knowledge—skills and tasks that students learn to perform. They are what students do with the content in the statements. Like statements, they are written at the smallest feasible grain size, and can be added, edited, and removed.
One or more statements combine with one or more actions to form a learning goal. Learning goals are the building blocks of courses and standards, and support assessment. They can be specific or general, as appropriate for the application. Learning goals can be added, edited, and removed.
The learning goal DetAvgSpeed reads, “Given the path traveled by an object during a time interval, the student determines the object’s average speed during that time interval.” This LG is built from one statement and one action:
Statements can be linked to other statements, and actions to other actions, by prerequisite relationships. Although in principle any two statements/actions can be linked, in Standards2030, “A is a prerequisite to B” means “Learning B requires A”. Prerequisite relationships do not indicate background knowledge, contextual knowledge, or even, strictly speaking, succession in time (that is handled in a different way, to be revealed later). I encourage users to abide by this philosophy, if only to keep graphs, described next, from becoming hopelessly complex.
Statements/actions and their prerequisite relationships can be viewed on a prerequisite graph. The graph is interactive. Prerequisites can be added and removed. Statement/action details can be viewed and statements/actions can be selected for editing or for category assignment. The statement prerequisite graph, but not yet the action prerequisite graph, features voice control.
Categories are simply a tagging scheme that can express just about anything about statements and actions. They contribute immensely to ease-of-use by enabling organizing and filtering. Categories are a two-level scheme consisting of Name|Value pairs. For example, under Category Name “Quantity”, the Values are “Position”, “Speed”, “Acceleration”, and so on. Categories are particularly useful and fun in the Prerequisite Graph. Filter the statements shown to only a particular Name|Value pair—otherwise the graph can be very big—and then color-code the displayed entries according to another category scheme.
Statements, actions, learning goals, and categories are held in Knowledge Bases. The current knowledge bases are K-12 Physics, K-12 Chemistry, K-12 Life Science, and K-12 Earth and Space Science. I’ve got a start on K-12 Physics, but the others have only one or two statements each. Your help is needed!
When I say that such-and-such can be edited, I mean that you can edit it, right now, if you want. You’ll have to provide a username and email address. Don’t worry too much about messing things up. Edits will be logged so they can be reverted if needed, and of course the database is backed up.
I’d like to give a special shout out to the site’s “graphics provider,” GoJS. Claude and I find GoJS easy to work with and I think the graphs are attractive. GoJS has been able to do everything I want and has capabilities far beyond that. Unfortunately, not having made any money on this, I haven’t paid GoJS anything—you can see the watermark denoting the evaluation license—so I thought they deserved at least this recognition.
I hope you will take a look. To get started, click Knowledge Base and select a knowledge base to work with.
Please contribute, comment, and enjoy!
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— Tom Regan