Structure of Content Area Standards

Structure

Nebraska has content area standards in a wide variety of subjects. While these standards have unique characteristics that capture aspects particular to each subject area, the standards have a consistent structure that allows educators, parents, and students to easily make sense of their organization. This is particularly advantageous at the elementary level, as this consistent organizing structure allows teachers to move seamlessly across content area standards when creating lessons and units that address more than one subject area.

To ensure that the standards for each content area are well-organized and internally coherent, NDE articulates a construct that guides the overall structure of the content area standards across subjects. While not all of the state’s content standards documents currently reflect this two-tier structure, the scheduled standards’ updates will result in the consistent formatting of all standards documents:

Standards

At the highest level of generality, Nebraska’s content area standards include a set of broad, overarching content-based statements that describe the basic cognitive, affective, or psychomotor expectations of students. They reflect long-term goals for learning.

Indicators

Under each standard are indicators, which further describe what a student must know and be able to do to meet the standard. Indicators are performance-based statements that provide educators with a clear understanding of the expected level of student learning and guidance. Indicators provide guidance for an assessment of student learning.

This information, including the references mentioned above, was taken from NDE’s Content Area Standards Reference Guide.