Mapping Academic Standards to K-12 Curriculum

The Client

A US-based online charter school that provides free personalized education to students in grades K-12.

The Background

In the United States, there are defined academic standards at both the federal (national) and state levels. These standards define what students in a certain grade should know about a specific subject. Schools at a location develop their curriculum to meet these standards. This ensures that students across the state are the same level of learning while meeting the minimum federal standards as well.

As part of the instructional design process, the instructional designers are required to map the defined academic standards for a subject and grade to the lesson-level learning objectives defined for a course.

The Requirement

The client had elearning courses for all subjects. These courses were divided into units, then topics, and then lessons under each topic. There were learning objectives defined at the lesson-level.

The client wanted two audits done:

1. Ensuring that the defined learning objectives mapped to the content in the lesson.
2. Mapping each learning objective to one or more applicable academic standards.  

Each course between 25 and 200 lessons depending on the grade and the topic.

The Challenges

Each state standard describes a concept that the learner must know or must be able to apply. We had to first understand the content each learning objective was addressing, and then locate the relevant standards.

During the content analysis, our instructional design team realized early on that:

1. one learning objective could map to several standards at a time, sometimes spanning multiple subjects
2. lesson content sometimes did not align to any of the state standards for the particular subject area or grade
3. lesson content covered far more than stated in the existing learning objectives
4. some lesson objectives did not have any associated content in the lesson
5. many lesson objectives were too broad and needed to be refined to make them specific

Not addressing these issues would mean that the curriculum-academic standards mapping exercise would not be comprehensive.

In addition to this, we were working under very constrained timelines.

What We Did

Our instructional design team essentially executed the projects in 3 stages:

1. Reading the content in all lessons in a unit.
2. Editing existing learning objectives and/or creating new learning objectives.
3. Mapping standards to the updated list of learning objectives

Mapping academic standards to learning objectives was the most challenging part of the project. Our first reference was the list of standards shared by the client. After that we searched the state’s published academic standards for the subject and the specific grade to find relevant standards. If we could not find relevant standards after these two searches, we expanded the search:

1. To first look at the standards for the same subjects but for upto two grades above and below the current grade
2. To the academic standards for the same grade but other subjects

The Result

In the first phase, we assisted the client with the mapping academic standards for over 1200 lessons across more than 20 courses in a very short timeframe. The mapping sheets we created are now the base to refine the course content and to create custom courses for specific students.