Case Study
Standards Alignments & Correlations Across States & Disciplines
Key Result Highlights
- 1,000 courses successfully aligned, across a wide range of states, standards, disciplines, and grade levels over a period of two years.
- 30 states’ standards-aligned.
- 12+ disciplines across grade levels covered, including American government, American history, astronomy, biology, earth science, economics, geography, geology, mathematics, nutrition, photography, physical education, physics, and world history.
The Client
A division of a global leader in education, the client develops and offers full-time, online K-12 schooling to students across the United States.
The Challenge
To operate within certain states and offer certain curricula, the client – which boasts hundreds of courses (both “legacy” and newly developed) – must demonstrate that individual courses explicitly cover at least 80% of the discipline standards that govern that particular district or state. To ensure or establish a roadmap to reach compliance with this benchmark, detailed alignment documents needed to be developed that offered a “crosswalk” between a course and particular standards, cite gaps in the content covered and explicate the details of any required “remediation” (i.e., guide a gap-filling effort).
Critical Success Factors
- Conduct comprehensive standards alignments across a wide range of courses/disciplines, varying sets of standards, and execute them with precision relative to the language (importantly, the verb articulated) each standard contains and how it manifests in the course content.
- Execute standards alignments according to the varying guidelines of individual states. For instance, some states require the mention of every appearance of the desired coverage in a course. Other states privilege a “greatest hits” approach in which one is asked to cite the most relevant examples of coverage.
- Timelines are often short and deadlines from states tend to be immutable – alignments to be developed quickly to enable an unhurried and thoughtful review and validation by the client itself.
Our Approach
- Trained over a dozen aligners on the particulars of the client’s course platforms, workflow, documentation, and overall guidelines to ensure subject matter experts, who serve as a “retain team” to the client could concentrate on the substance of each alignment while expertly navigating the client’s unique systems and approach.
- Selected and trained SMEs/aligners (who are also former educators, and thus were previously in receipt of alignment documents as “customers”) across several key disciplines, including ELA, math, social studies, science, and more.
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